.; f 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



til 



i^w 



^'H: 



THE BOHLEN LECTURES, 1878 



THE 



Fitness of Christianity to Man 

f 

K D; HUNTINGTON, S.T.D., 

BISHOP OF CENTRAL NEW YORK, 

Author of Grahaj7te and Lowell Lecttires on the ''^Divine Aspects of 

Human Society,^^ '''■Christian Believing and Living-,''^ ''^Sermons 

for the Peopky'' '"''Christ in the Christian Year,'' etc 



''1? 



PRINTED FOR THE RECTOR, CHURCH WARDENS, AND VESTRYMEN OF THE CHURCH 

OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, TRUSTEES OF THE 

JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 Bible House 
1 878 




TT 



It was required that the matter contained in this small volume 
should be delivered in a church to an audience not diflfering much 
from the congregations that generally gather in cities for worship, 
except as it might happen to include a larger proportion of edu- 
cated minds. It was also demanded by the terms of the lecture- 
ship that the lectures, having been so delivered, should be forth- 
with issued in print as a treatise. To almost any student this 
twofold necessity must be somewhat embarrassing, as involving 
a certain literary incompatibility. It will appear that I chose to 
keep before me in writing the assembly of hearers, and have not 
thought it worth while to take pains to strike out some forms of 
expression and some illustrative passages belonging to a public 
address. 

I had contemplated the use of a considerable array of references 
to authorities, and to agreeing or differing authors. But on the 
whole I see no worthy occasion for it, and therefore present only 
a few marginal acknowledgments to writers to whom I am con- 
scious of being indebted. F. D. H. 

Syracuse, Easter-Tuesday, 1878. 



Copyright, 1878, ey T. Whittaker. 



The John Bohlen Lectureship. 



John Bohlen, who died in this city on the 26th day 
of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One 
Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to religious 
and charitable objects in accordance with the well-known 
wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees, 
under the will of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and paid over 
to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of the 
Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia," in trust, a sum 
of money for certain designated purposes, out of which 
fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set apart for 
the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, 
upon the following terms and conditions : 

" The money shall be invested in good substantial and 
safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called 
The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be 
applied annually to the payment of a qualiiEied person, 
whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and pub- 
lication of at least one hundred copies of two or more 
lecture sermons. These lectures shall be delivered at 
such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the 



persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from 
time to time determine, giving at least six months' notice 
to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the 
same may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting 
the same person as lecturer a second time within a pe- 
riod of five years. The payment shall be made to said 
lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and received 
by the trustees, of all the income for the year derived 
from said fund, after defraying the expense of printing 
the lectures and the other incidental expenses attending 
the same. 

"The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within 
the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, 
for the delivery of what are known as the 'Bampton 
Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively 
connected with or relating to the Christian Religion. 

"The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month 
of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be 
done, by the persons who for the time being shall hold 
the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
of the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity; 
the Rector of said Church ; the Professor of Biblical Learn- 
ing, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the Pro- 
fessor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 

"In case either of said offices are vacant, the others 
may nominate the lecturer." 

Under this trust, the Right Rev. F. D. Huntington, 
S.T.D., Bishop of the Diocese of Central New York, was 
appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1878. 

Philadelphia, Easter, 1878. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Christ among Men : His Approach the Human Heart, 7 



LECTURE H. 

Christ Declared to Men of a False Religious Cul- 
ture. St. Paul at Athens, 37 

LECTURE HL 

Christ in the Presence of Doubt and Disbelief. The 
World without Him, and with Him, . . .65 

LECTURE IV. 

The Religion of Christ in the Power of Action : 
its Appeal to the Human Will, . . . .97 



LECTURE I, 



©Ixrist unxoMQ ^Xjetx: ^xb ^ppxoKcU 
to tUxic ^xxmmx "^t^xt 



"2Cl)e t!S&oxli teas matre fles!), anti tftoclt amonfl us/* 

St. John i : 14. 

*'3Sut 3tsm . . . Itneb) all men, antr iteetietj not tf)at anw 
sijoulD testify) oC man; for ?9e fencU) toljat teas in man," 

St. John 2 : 24, 25. 

"Santo 50U, ® men, K rail; anli m» boicc is to ti)e sons of man." 

Proverbs 8:4. 



Clxrist am0ti0 HXtw : 



HIS APPROACH TO THE HUMAN HEART. 

*' Unto you, O men, I call ; and my voice is to 
the sons of man." The voice travels down from 
a region outside of nature. The '' Wisdom" that 
is speaking speaks to Humanity, but is not of it. 
" I was set up from everlasting, from the begin- 
ning, or ever the earth was." In the grand per- 
sonification Hebrew ideas are beginning to take 
the form and color of the Greek, the Greek not 
only of the Platonists but of St. John. But be- 
hind the Hebrew '' vision," which has given light 
to every later age of the world, and behind the 
Greek thought, which has really given law to 
its intellectual life, there is a world, having in it 
the Fountain of all light and thought and law. 
Out of that comes the voice. In the awful bur- 
den of its meaning it is mysterious ; but in its 
language it is like the speech of a mother calling 
her child : '* Hearken unto me, O ye children ; O 
ye simple, understand." Solomon was a king and 
knew men ; but something rang through his soul, 
not of his crown or his court, which said, " By 
me kings reign, — and princes, and nobles, and 
judges;" and then it said, " I love them that love 
me, and those that seek me early shall find me." 



8 ECTURE FIRST. 



" Before the mountains were settled, when He pre- 
pared the heavens, I was there. Whoso findeth 
me findeth Hfe" — of all you '' sons of men." A 
thousand and seventy years after, a son of a Gali- 
lean sailor, having left his fishing-net to bleach on 
the sand, wrote the life of '' the Son of man." It 
begins in this way : *' In the beginning was the 
Word, and the Word was with God, and the 
Word was God. In him was life ; and the life 
was the light of men." Wisdom, the voice said, 
crieth at the entry of the city, at the coming in at 
the doors : '' My delights were with the sons of 
men." St. John writes, in the proem of his Gospel, 
"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us'' 
The point, dropping out of account here any 
difference between the Hebrew and the Greek 
dress of the thought, is, that in the universe, or 
whole reality of things, the two spheres, natural 
and supernatural, are equally real ; in both of 
them there is life ; they open into one another ; 
life passes, in persons, from one to the other ; 
both are for men ; and the one living bond of 
unity, whose life and light are common to both 
alike is '* The Word." Whether in the Jewish 
mind, which was not metaph^^sical, or in Gnostic 
speculation, '' Wisdom " corresponded best with 
the second or third person in the Christian Trinity 
is not material. The Wisdom of God coming down 
to the earth is a divine Man, seen by St. John, — the 
man of men, who raises humanity to heaven. The 
more we think this thought, and trace it through 
its relations, the more we shall find it to signify 
*'the faith that was once delivered to the saints." 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 



By one of these "saints," if we use the 
name in its original sense, and for the defence of 
that ''faith" this lectureship was founded. His 
own manhood having been fashioned and perme- 
ated by its power, when his ripe mind looked 
over from the one world into the other, he re- 
membered the great inheritance of Christendom, 
Revelation : — the trust itself, which is the faith 
deposited ; the trust-deeds, or Christian docu- 
ments ; the trusteeship, in an imperishable church. 
This rose before him, as it had risen first within him, 
the one immortal benefit of man. His surviving 
representatives, shaping his general and liberal 
design, have directed it by the terms of the 
Bampton Foundation at Oxford. The first w^ords 
of John Bampton, Canon of Salisbury, defining 
his plan, were these :— '' To confirm and establish 
the Christian faith." I am left in no doubt at all, 
therefore, what is given me now to do. In the 
bounds of that comprehensive purpose I find 
room enough to move with liberty, not reaching 
beyond it, but choosing and following a particu- 
lar line within it. Two questions must be kept 
straight before us all the way. There are 
believers, and there are deniers. So far as men 
believe, can their belief be made more definite, and 
by being more definite be stronger, and by being 
stronger be more serviceable to the world? So 
far as the age denies or doubts, how is faith to 
win back the skeptic to her side, naturalizing him 
in her house, and training there a race of sons 
and daughters as believing and as brave as any 
that have ever lived and died ? These are ques- 



lO LECTURE FIRST. 

tions for the understanding, and to your under- 
standing the appeal must principally lie. Heart 
and hands, I know, have their office, in this nine- 
teenth century apostleship, of regaining in America 
a rationalizing Athens, a sensual Corinth, a law- 
worshipping Rome, and a ritual Jerusalem, to the 
hol}^ freedom of the Son of God. Infidelity is as 
often converted, I think, in any land or time, by 
sympathy as by scholarship, by practical good- 
ness as by processes of the mind, and I hope we 
shall see that distinctly, if you go on with me in 
order. But here it is for the study of a subject 
that you meet, and it is on your understanding 
that you will expect me to lay such thoughts as I 
can bring. 

My plan is this. We start with ourselves as 
Ave are. You and I are the beginning of the 
argument. It is a plain postulate. The axiom 
is safe ; for neither Dr. Strauss nor Blanco 
White, Professor Huxley nor Matthew Arnold 
denies himself to be. This little personal domain, 
the '' I myself," may not be a thing very scientifi- 
cally apprehended ; but with all its complexity it 
is familiar, and every fibre is sensitive. Outside, 
objective to this living thing, confronting it, a 
voice calling to it, searching it, commanding it, is 
what we call Christianity. It is more than a voice 
— a substantive force, the kingdom of God, a rule 
of life, a creed offered to belief—" one spirit and 
one body." We have, then, man, and we have a 
Gospel. What I propose, with the help of your 
attention, is to prove the fitness of these two to 
one another, each to each. We undertake to 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 1 I 

show that the Gospel is to be believed because it 
is suited to man. Whatever materials of illustra- 
tion may be gathered from outward nature, from 
books, from society, from history, the sinew and 
strength of the demonstration are in yourselves. 
This gives me great advantage. The proposi- 
tion is. The CJiristiari faitJi is found to be true by its 
adaptation to mankind. Man wants it in his consti- 
tution, grows and ripens in every faculty by its 
supplies, and comes to the measure of the stature 
of his perfection only by the working in him of 
its power. If man is authentic, so is the Christian 
revelation. If man has a legitimate place in the 
universe, the Gospel has a place there with him, 
by the same right. 

The Chinese student in the study of Bishop 
Boone, representing intelligent humanity at its 
farthest modern remove from Christ, speaks the 
irresistible verdict of the race. He was a teacher 
among his Pagan countrymen, and was taken 
into the mission-family to learn English and 
translate the Bible into the Celestial tongue. 
For a long time he remained insensible to any 
thing in the Scriptures but their literary beauty. 
Abruptly, one day, he rose from his manuscripts, 
with the New Testament open in his hand, and, 
Avith the rapid manner of one who has been star- 
tled by a great discovery, he exclaimed, '' Who- 
ever made this book made me. It knows all that 
is in my heart. It tells me what no one but a 
God can know about me. Whoever made me 
made that book." What is true of the book is 
true of him who is its life. Whoever made you 



12 LECTURE FIRST. 

a man, and me, is in Christy reconciling us to him- 
self. 

Some special gromids for this affirmation will 
be presented by way of introduction, to-night, 
found in the person of our Lord, his personal 
attraction to men, and his personal sway over 
them as they are everywhere. After that there 
will be three further divisions of the main subject, 
answering to three elements that are in this 
human nature, essential to it everywhere, and 
conspicuous in proportion as it rises from barbar- 
ism. First, we shall see man as a worshipping 
creature, with a believing capacity, and in the 
loftiest conditions of human culture, but without 
revelation, as Paul found him at Athens, swing- 
ing betAveen atheism and superstition ; then as an 
understanding creature, with a capacity for 
knowledge, and at the same time capable of set- 
ting his knowing faculty against belief; then as a 
creature of action, with the power of will, organ- 
ized for enterprise and the conquest of nature, as 
he rises in the Roman and w^estern world. Liv- 
ing questions or issues, you will see, fresh to 
the interest of the times we are living in, stand 
near by, along the whole course of that fourfold 
inquiry : the question of faith and reason in order- 
ing life, of spirit and form in worship, of secular- 
ism and religion in education, of individualism 
and organic force in spiritual movements to 
evangelize mankind, and of the relations of the 
principles of science to the growth of the king- 
dom of God in the soul. Through these four ave- 
nues, if the Spirit of wisdom and of power conde- 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. •13 

scends to guide us in so holy a study, may some 
truth and some charity enter in and dwell ! 

When the hea\^ens were opened down, in the' 
vision of Patmos, we are told of the descending 
city, perfect and everlasting, from God and for 
man, having him who is God and man for its 
eternal light, that *' the city lieth foursquare," 
gates open on every side, the nations bringing 
their glory and honor into it : '' foursquare," 
"the length, the breadth and the height of it 
equal." 

This evening I lay before you three or four 
traits of Christ's Religion, closely connected with 
each other, which when they are fairly seen, 
stripped of every thing that disguises or disfig- 
ures them, take a natural hold of human confi- 
dence. Hitherto, for the greater part, in the eastern 
and western theology, the battle has been fought 
on one or another of six fields — the biblical writ- 
ings as a book, their critical sense, their moral 
value, prophecy, miracle, and ecclesiastical au- 
thority. What lies outside of these lines, in the 
patristic, Galilean, German, and Anglican apolo- 
getics, important as it often is, is rather incidental 
than principal. Apologetics is the science of the 
defence of the faith. The word is to be divested 
in your minds of the enfeebling impression that 
attaches to the idea of an ''apology," in popular 
use, as if Christianity offered an excuse for its 
coming, or asked leave to be. The truth is, the 
Church waited for attack before it offered a de- 
fence. It arose, on the earth, visibly, from Bethle- 
hem, Calvary, and the broken sepulchre ; but it 



I^ LECTURE FIRST. 

was actually planted downward from heaven, and 
stood, a positive institution, on three continents, 
holding a document in its hand which has never 
been wrenched out of it, witnessing to a Christ 
who dwells within it, and working not only in his 
spoken name but by his //^-working power. Its 
attitude was affirmative, not negative. Its creed 
was shorter and simpler even than now, till the 
days of Nicaea and Constantinople enlarged the 
statement, completed the definition, and handed 
over the symbol to after-ages. It had one article 
— Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God and 
the Saviour of the world. Denial, heresy, objec- 
tion — born as much of monastic speculation in the 
cave, and mysticism in the desert, where burrow- 
ing eremites bored and carved the rocks into 
mountainous honeycombs, as of humanity earnest- 
ly facing the problems of life and duty, where 
wisdom cried at the entry of the city and by 
the paths of men — challenged the orthodox belief. 
Then began the great labor of the apologists and 
defenders. There must now be negation of error 
as it is in Arian, Gnostic, and Ebionite, as well as 
affirmation of the truth as it is in Jesus. From 
that time forth the walls have been manned, the 
gates have been kept, the colors have not sunk, 
the city of God still stands ; and the conflicts have 
been waged chiefly on the six areas that I have 
named. 

But, after all — and this is what I venture to 
think has been sometimes forgotten — in every one 
of these lines of argument, human nature, after the 
Christ revealed^ is the principal factor concerned. 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. I 5 

You argue for revelation, that it is authentic, that 
it is genuine, that it is self-consistent. By what 
instrument, then, is your argument measured, and 
weighed, and your proof tested, but by the 
reason of a man ? How does your revelation 
" tell ?" Where does it enter ? On what sub- 
stance does it strike ? What is its terminus ad 
queni ? Plainly, whencesoever it proceeds, by 
whatever path it has arrived, or by whatever cre- 
dentials it certifies its errand, its object is the 
heart of man. For him, for you, the heavens 
were parted, the voice spoke, the prophet fore- 
told, the miracle amazed the witnesses, the cross 
was set up, the two Testaments were recorded. 
Those '' saints" to whom the faith was once for 
all delivered were human saints, men like these 
here now. There was something '' delivered," to 
be sure, that men must apprehend, judge of, take 
in by intellectual reception, and hold by faculties 
which, having once grasped it, can defend it ; and 
then there is soinetJiing else, another element, in 
this revelation, which men must seize, if they are 
to have it at all, by another capacity — a receptiv- 
ity in them not of reason only but of spiritual 
sympathy, an answer of the affections, a reaching 
out of desire, a welcome into the heart. It is 
that something in the religion of Christ of which 
man says, " This is for me ; this I must have, be- 
cause it meets my want, fills my hunger, helps 
me when I am weak, saves me Avhen I know I am 
in peril, and gives me peace where no peace was ; 
it suits me; it is mine." Will it not be, then, for 
the honor of the faith, for the confirmation of it in 



1 6 LECTURE FIRST. 

those who have a little and can say, '' Lord, I be- 
lieve, help thou mine unbelief," for the creating 
of it possibly in some who have refused it because 
they have not seen it as it is, if we can once behold 
its fitness to our whole nature as we are ? 

I. Notice, as pointing in this direction, at the 
outset, that before the Gospel was committed to 
Scriptures, to a dogmatic or philosophical sys- 
tem, or to any organization or institution what- 
ever, it was committed to men, or to man as man. 
The beginnings of Christendom are seen in the 
last half of the first chapter qf St. John. A story 
more intensely and simply human is not found in 
any literature. With the resources of heaven and 
earth at his command, the Founder of an empire 
which was to lift itself over the throne of the 
Caesars, and outlast every structure under the 
sun, spoke to a few persons in the most absolutely 
human of all conditions, employments, relation- 
ships. Into these persons he put the kingdom of 
heaven. For a long time he was apparently ut- 
terly indifferent Avhether the Gospel ever took 
any other shape than in the life of a society of 
men. When his neighbors and countrymen arose 
and followed him, they recognized in him no 
other character than that of an extraordinary 
man. It was, in fact, humanity in its most naked 
condition. Without education, without patron- 
age, without pedigree, without flattery, without 
policy, without an army, without property, 
coming out of a village whose very name cov- 
ered him with contempt, speaking unpopular 
words, crossing the prejudices of his people, of- 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. ij 

fending rulers, alone, misunderstood, this man 
rose into a permanent and immeasurable mastery 
over every thinking- and strong nation on the 
earth. Among all the phenomena of history this 
is absolutely alone in majesty, in mystery. So 
far as we are informed, he never v/rote a sen- 
tence, or ordered a sentence to be written, except 
when he stooped and traced on the ground some 
words that any passing human foot would tread 
out, or the next rainfall wash away. Years 
passed before one chapter of the New Testament 
was recorded on paper or parchment. He never 
hinted that a body of doctrinal divinity was any 
part of his apparatus for converting or redeem- 
ing the world. Yet all this while the entire gift 
of the Gospel and grace of his mediation was 
alive, and was at work among men born of wo- 
men. Could there be a more striking sign where 
he meant the primal attestations of his truth to be 
sought ? 

The Bible was to come. The place for it was 
provided beforehand in a Christly and a churchly 
providence. Arid when it should come its au- 
thority was to be supreme — all ecclesiastical 
councils, creeds, standards, to be regulated by .its 
unchanging solar light, as sundials by the sun. 
No man, no society of men, not the church, east 
or west, can touch this finished and sufficient 
Word, to add one text, to take away a syllable, to 
alter an idea, any more than they can all manu- 
facture a ministry or create a sacrament. And 
yet, in the order of the creating and inspiring 
Spirit, the kingdom of God on the earth came 



1 8 LECTURE FIRST. 

from the Son of man, not first out of a book into 
men, but out of men into the book. There is 
a profound meaning in a saying of Mr. Coleridge, 
that we know the Bible to be inspired *' because 
it finds man." Were it ever to cease to find him, 
it would drop from the hand of our race like a 
withered leaf ; for then, either on the volume of 
the book, or on the heart of his child, the Al- 
mighty himself would have let go his hold. 

This Master teaches. In any account of his 
speech, by evangelist or tradition, there is no 
attributing of his attraction to what is called 
eloquence — only to the matter of his conversa- 
tions and the impressions of his person. Yet such 
is his mysterious sway that boats are forsaken on 
the shore by fishermen, custom-house officers 
turn from their tax-tables, and a procession of fol- 
lowers begins to move along the rural streets, 
which lengthens and widens, through countries 
and centuries, till it swells to four hundred mil- 
lions of living men at a time. There is only one 
possible explanation. He touches something inside 
the human heart which was zvaiting to be touched. 
What else is meant when he is called ''the Desire 
of all nations" ? 

It is said the common people were his glad 
hearers — and by common people are not meant 
dull people, or vulgar, or illiterate, or unclean 
people, but people who have in them, with least 
overlaying, what is common to man. 

Take one of the constant topics of his preach- 
ing. On the pages that report it you find scarce- 
ly any word more conspicuous than the word 



CHRIST AMONG MEM. 



^' life." He brings, he offers, he promises, he 
gives life. '' I am come that they might have 
life, and might have it more abundantly." Now, 
except in the rare triumph of some commanding 
passion, or in the terrible collapse of despair, men 
fear and fight and hate death. Christ is born 
of a dying race. Unless he is stronger, death is 
the one universal king, and will conquer him as it 
conquers every man at last. But men do not 
want to die ; they want to live. Christ meets 
them and tells them, " You may stop dying, who- 
soever will, and begin to live forever. The life is 
in me, imperishable, eternal. Join yourself to 
me, be one with me, and this life flows into 
you, and lo ! death is abolished." The physical 
change remains ; but it is not what you knew 
as death. The coffin crumbles — not your child, 
your mother, your friend. The pulse stops — not 
thought. One kind of fabric dissolves, but from 
its ashes there is immortal beauty — a spiritual 
body. '* Whosoever liveth and believeth in me 
shall never die." You wanted to live, and live 
you may. A few believed it on his word. He 
died and rose, and the faith was never to forsake 
the heart of humanity again. No teacher ever 
filled that universal and mighty longing for life 
but Christ. 

Again, the law that matches life is love. Man 
is not separable from the social instinct. Spite of 
selfishness and care and greed and slavery, he 
seeks his fellow, he chngs to his kind, he builds a 
home, he is stronger for the touch of another's 
hand. Can a blind instinct like that be turned 



20 LECTURE FIRST. 

into a clear-sighted and triumphant principle ? 
Where is the wonder-worker that can transmute 
a fickle sentiment, which every appetite or insult 
can degrade, into a force so majestic and so beau- 
tiful that it shall heal the misery of every mortal 
pain, and bind its illuminated children into a 
brotherhood outreaching the bounds of interest 
or nationality ? That brotherhood Christ creates. 
By that principle he plants and builds a church. 
He clears the sweet force of every bitter ingredi- 
ent and every belittling limitation. He sends it 
over the earth from his cross, and, as the charity 
of the Gospel, it transfigures the face of the 
world by regenerating its heart. Not Confucius, 
or Zoroaster, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Soc- 
rates, or Marcus Aurelius, or Shakespeare does 
this. Another deep and broad '' desire" of man 
is met by the Son of man alone. 

Again, humanity, naked and near to the earth 
as you please, wants conscious reconciliation with 
a power above itself. Travellers and sailors have 
now uncovered the globe. We know what sorts 
of super-brutal animals it holds. There is no hid- 
den type left to be dragged to light. The fact is 
public that propitiation is a cosmopolitan idea, not 
Jewish only but ethnic, with exceptions too insig- 
nificant to be reckoned. INIan wants to be forgiven. 
Jesus of Nazareth, first carrying the conceptions 
of men to their highest mark by his own life and 
lips, embodying a visible divinity in his three 
and thirty years, till no explanation of his human 
character can be found except in the irresistible 
confession of his title *' Emmanuel," suffers. 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 21 

*' One man dies for the people," the magnificent 
oracle of a redeemed creation from calculating 
Caiaphas' diplomatic tongue. Never before or 
since, never anywhere else, was God seen in 
sacrifice. Yet that was the one secret glory 
which not only Simeons in the temple but Mag- 
dalens in tears had wanted to see, ever since the 
flaming swords on the gate of Eden had closed 
the hope of a natural return to innocence. And 
now, will that sacrificial sign of forgiveness be so 
trusted that another universal longing shall be 
filled, and mankind have the Saviour they desired, 
from humanity at its highest to humanity at its 
worst ? Look high and look low. Take extremes 
of humanity so wide apart that between them 
there shall be room for every human grade and 
pattern. Down by the slimy edges of Indian 
jungles, down along the swamps of Congo, down 
in the dimness of Dakota, not one but many thou- 
sands, some of them made heroes and martyrs, 
have said or sung, *' The blood of Jesus Christ 
cleanseth us from all sin," and have risen into 
clean lives and the liberty of righteousness. We 
look from the bottom of the world to the top. A 
line of the loftiest intellects that have led the cul- 
ture and progress of the race beckon down to us 
from their battlements ; the Augustines and Chry- 
sostoms, the Raphaels and Newtons, the Faradays 
and Keplers and Bunsens of science, of reason 
and of art, and they say, " Not unto us." There 
is one mind, by common consent, in compass, in 
creativeness, in height and breadth and uncon- 
scious power occupying a place among them that 



2 2 LECTURE FIRST. 

is like a throne. In Shakespeare s last will, when 
the eye that had ranged through nature was lifted 
to the heavens, he wrote this : " I commend my 
soul into the hands of God, my creator ; hoping 
and assuredly believing, through the only merits 
of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker 
of life everlasting." I think we shall conclude 
there are no ranges of man's mind where the 
hunger for pardon, as well as for life and for love, 
is not satisfied in the faith of Christ. 

It may be said that the purpose of the Gospel 
is the invigoration of humanity. What more 
conclusive certification could it have ? Horrible 
travesties there have been, I know, even by its 
friends, of that benignant movement of heaven 
towards man. Irrational piety has put upon it 
incredible imputations, and held them up as its 
title to honor. But can any candid critic dis- 
pute this declaration? To every element and 
faculty that properly belongs to universal man 
Christ imparts a quickening, empowering, enlarg- 
ing energy. The argument becomes very close. 
That which invigorates every force, harmonizes 
with every law, and bears towards perfection 
every quality of the nature it salutes, must be 
true to that nature. 

II. From these instances of his teachings turn 
to the Teacher himself. In this respect Christiani- 
ty stands absolutely original and alone ; that from 
end to end, as spirit, as doctrine, as law, as life, it 
is embodied in a person. Christianity is Christ. 
He, not his words, not his ideas, not his prin- 
ciples, primarily, but he is the substance of his 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 



23 



religion. To have him, as one person may have 
another, by faith, by one Ufe flowing into another 
Hfe, is the essential character of a disciple. All 
Christian knowledge is the knowledge of him. 
All Christian growth is growing up into him. 
All ^' progress" is progress into his boundless 
grace and immaculate holiness. " He that hath 
the Son hath life." See the intensity of the 
humanity. You talk of a " Gospel of to-day," as 
if days had gospels ! The religion of yesterday, 
the religion of to-day, and the religion of the 
future forever, are the same religion, because he, 
the person, is yesterday, to-day, forever, the 
same, not parting with his identity. Think of this, 
you men, when you hear dreamers in the night 
babbling of a " religion of the age," as if ages 
made religions, or originated revelations, and 
did not themselves all lie like straining but com- 
forted children in the mighty arms of the ever- 
lasting wisdom and love of the Lord ! 

We speak complacently of our " times," our 
"age," our "day." Well, then, what day is it? 
What do we say when we would fix the place of 
this self-congratulating era? We say, it is the 
nineteenth century, or we say, it is the year one 
thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight. Have 
you thought, you sons of men, how you came to 
reckon so? It is the nineteenth century after 
zuhat f It is eighteen hundred and seventy-eight 
years since zvhen ? I open Mr. Tyndall's lectures, 
Mr. Stuart Mill's essays, Comte's positive philo- 
sophy, which would have us believe, if thc}^ could, 
that Christianity was a temporary phase of 



24 LECTURE FIRST. 

superstitious speculation, and they date their 
books this way, like the rest of us. It means that, 
in the inmost and awful sense of men, all the his- 
tory and all the life of all the nations strong in 
brain and strong in arm, turn about one supreme 
and central and glorious person ; the advent and 
redemption of the Son of man, who is the Son of 
God. His entrance is the one great hour of time. 
As often as you write those figures that mark the 
year of the Lord, believer or unbeliever, on your 
day-book, or bill of sale, or title-deed, or letter, 
you write the concession of the world to the 
creed of Christendom. Sciences and arts are 
progressive in their nature, because their elements 
and materials lie in shifting and struggling minds, 
or in beds of matter whence they are gradually 
drawn, as experiment and discovery accumulate 
their tools. Christianity is not progressive, be- 
cause Christianity is Christ — absolute life, human- 
ity perfect, and unchangeably divine. 

In the fourth century before Christ there 
appeared at Athens two men, master and pupil, 
who in two diverging directions gave an extraor- 
dinary impulse to the thinking faculty of mankind, 
and to knowledge ; an impulse that has never yet 
been spent. They gathered up all that the world 
had found out before in the two great depart- 
ments of matter and mind, physics and meta- 
physics, reduced it to order, and, by pure intel- 
lectual force, one as a logician, the other as an 
idealist, may be said to have moulded the mental 
character of scholars from that time on ; the two 
great schools of thought they led — nominalists 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 25 

and realists — being traceable down through all 
the early Christian and middle ages, and to 
our own time. Even now, language, literature, 
philosophy, theology — and consider how much 
these four names include ! — show the stamp of 
their commanding genius. They have both 
largely influenced the intellectual side of the life 
of the Church. But these two men, Aristotle 
and Plato, did not embody their respective sys- 
tems. They did not incarnate the two philoso- 
phies in any such way that you will not get the 
whole of what they brought, with no personal re- 
lation to the men. Scholars from all the Grecian 
schools and the cities of the East sat fascinated 
at their feet ; and any one of them might be 
Aristotelian or Platonist with no influence what- 
ever from the life of either. To the generations 
of all these later centuries their names are names, 
and nothing more. The intellectual realm of 
each is a kingdom without a king. Four hundred 
years after them came Christ. His system and 
he are one. It is the person, the man Christ 
Jesus, that is preached, and fed upon, in all the 
Church. To-night many millions of men Avould 
die for their love of him. 

I said that there was no parallel for this 
method in history. China, India, Persia, Egypt, 
Mediterranean Europe, all had their religious 
systems. No one of them rests on a personal or 
even an historical basis. None of them can be 
seen in the life of a character, living, as Jesus 
lived, in the daylight of a well-known historical 
period, whose biography is capable of being tested 



2 6 LECTURE FIRST. 

by every kind of historical criterion. They are 
all mythologies. Mohammedanism, to be sure, 
was introduced by an individual. But Mo- 
hammed himself *' claimed no special relation- 
ship to God," never identified his character 
with his doctrine, and propagated his system 
by military force. 

Nobody here proposes, I presume, to compare 
the Koran with the New Testament, or imagines 
that Islamism would take hold of any other than 
an inferior, unscientific, sensuous race. Much the 
same might be said of Buddhism. No claim is 
set up that it is a system of historical realities, 
verified by historical tests. The shadowy ac- 
counts of Sakyamani, in some sense the founder 
of Buddhism, making him come into the w^orld in 
the form of a white elephant, giving him twelve 
thousand names and several successive births, and 
enveloping his story in a cloud of legendary ex- 
travagance, are as utterly unlike the sweet and 
simple narratives of the Evangelists as the doc- 
trines of annihilation, atheism, and despair, which 
form that dreary theology, are unlike the blessed 
teachings of the Saviour's mercy, sacrifice, and 
resurrection. 

One of the conceits of the most recent rational- 
ism has been to bring the maxims and medita- 
tions of the Vedas and Zendavesta into the rank 
of the spiritual instructions of the Gospel. Sup- 
pose they were all that is claimed for them, 
close akin to the Christian ethics, or worthy to 
be compared with portions of the Sermon on 
the Mount, what have they done? What have 



CHRIST AMONG MEN, 2^ 

they done even for the foul, cruel, lazy popula- 
tions that have received them ? They have had 
those sottish communities to themselves half a 
thousand years longer than Christianity has 
lived. Buddha and Kung-fu-tse have had no 
rivals till the modern missionary preached Christ, 
and then Hindostan was pierced with arrows of 
light in less than ninety years. 

There is a curious and special phenomenon ex- 
actly to the purpose of my argument. A promi- 
nent Hindoo scholar, the son of a Brahmin, was 
born in Bengal in the last century, and died in 
England in 1833. He studied English, edited an 
English newspaper, admired the Christian litera- 
ture, and intellectually outgrew the mythology 
of his people. His notion was exactly that of 
some of our native American Brahmins, that the 
strength of Christianity lies in its ethical and 
religious principles, apart from its superhuman 
energy in the person, incarnation, life, death, and 
resurrection of the Son of God. Rammohun 
Roy accordingly published, in both the Bengalee 
and English languages, extracts from the four 
Gospels, to which he gave the title " The Precepts 
of Jesus ; a Guide to Peace and Happiness." 
There are a few copies of that volume in the li- 
braries of this country, but probably not a score 
of my auditors ever saw it, or even heard of its 
existence. It fell on the strong, warm, passion- 
ate life of the Eastern world like a crystal snow- 
flake on the tropical jungles. Heavenly truth as 
it all was, it was not our Gospel. It was the 
voice without the living Lord, the moral anatomy 



28 LECTURE FIRST. 

of the new faith, emptied of its beating heart and 
its precious blood. 

III. I offer you at present but one proof more. 
We pass to a ground of confidence, as catholic 
believers, far beyond the possible bounds of the 
old apologies. 

You are the sons of a scientific age. It is the 
honor of real science that she faces all the facts, 
makes room for them, and accounts for them if 
she can. We claim for Revelation a place in the 
convictions and a welcome to the minds of mod- 
ern men, the most scientific included, on the very 
principles which lie at the foundation of all sound 
scientific inquiry. The Church presents to sci- 
ence the fact of CJiristendom. We say it is as wor- 
thy of a place and an explanation as any alkali in 
your crucibles, any bird-track or ornitholite in 
the sand. Somewhere that immense monument 
must have had a builder over it ; it commemo- 
rates, and there must be a thing commemorated ; 
a sign, and a thing signified must be behind it. 
This enormous tree — St. Paul's temple that groivs 
— spreading its live branches over sixty gener- 
ations of souls, and always widening from one 
Epiphany to another, where is its root ? Your 
very botanists and anatomists tell you things do 
not grow from nothing. Come with me a few min- 
utes only, to find an answer to this question. 

You here all know the geographic extent of 
the Christian provinces to-day. They embrace 
the two great continents that control the forces 
and lead the advance of mankind. Even of the 
remainder of the inhabited territory this Christian 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 29 

cause holds ports of entrance, and man}^ chosen 
interior posts, positions that are keys to the sev- 
eral lands. In the representative sense, as hav- 
ing access to seats of population, and uttering a 
voice there, the great period may be said to have 
been reached, predicted by the Saviour, when the 
Gospel should be preached to all nations. Under 
an impulse — please to take notice — which sprang 
up afresh with mighty energy within this passing 
century, just when a certain school of philoso- 
phers have been rash enough to pronounce Chris- 
tianity a spent force, its institutions superannu- 
ated and its ideas obsolete, so that men must be 
casting about for a new religion or Gospel of to- 
day — just then, by a general movement of mis- 
sionary life, whose sweep is as wide as modern 
commerce, emanating from the breast of old 
Christian communities, the lines of this Cause are 
pushing forward from the points just mentioned, 
penetrating steadily the sluggish and corrupt 
masses of heathenism farther and farther in. 
Starting from the Straits of Gibraltar, and mov- 
ing southward along the trading stations, around 
by the Cape to Madagascar, and thence following 
the indentations of the Asiatic coast to the further 
limit of Kamtschatka, you encounter constant- 
ly these unarmed but irresistible intrenchments, 
bases of aggressive operations. Large groups of 
islands. Pagan sixty years ago, are effectively oc- 
cupied. Traverse either of the two divisions 
of America, or the three sections of the Eastern 
hemisphere, and as long as you keep on the high- 
ways of civilization you come upon working cen- 



30 LECTURE FIRST. 

tres, not of a stationary but of an adventuring, 
emigrating, colonizing, spreading Christianity. 

I ask you to observe that I am not using this re- 
markable extension of Christianity as a final proof 
that it is true ; nor am I bringing mere numbers 
or mere activities of self-propagation to convince 
any body of Christian principles, as if truth ever 
yet had majorities for her criterion, or expected 
to win her w^ay by a show of hands. The purpose 
of this reference to the broad theatre of Christian 
action is particular, and it is this : The whole of 
this vast operation has proceeded from one spot 
or birthplace on the globe ; it all dates from one 
point of time ; it all owes — confesses that it owes, 
nay, claims it and glories in it with universal con- 
fidence and a unanimous joy — its very existence 
to one Personage, whose name is forever on the 
lips of all its messengers and workmen. 

Suppose you put yourself at any one locality 
on this immense surface, from centre to circum- 
ference ; it may be in any of the ancient cathe- 
drals, built up slowly, layer b}^ layer, of eloquent 
masonry, through generations or centuries, by the 
patient hands of the same abiding faith ; or in one 
of the countless little companies of scarcely shel- 
tered worshippers gathered together on the fron- 
tiers of new territories, along the outskirts of 
newly -discovered countries, on patches of verdure 
in deserts or wildernesses, on the edges of remote 
islands of the oceans ; it may be in any one of 
the tens of thousands of crowded metropolitan 
churches or any one of the hundreds of thousands 
of scattered rural sanctuaries ; it may be in Yeddo, 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 3 I 

Jerusalem, Constantinople, Canterbury, Washing- 
ton, San Francisco, this house, or in a mission-sta- 
tion like one that the Bishop of Prince Rupert's 
Land told me of, in his diocese, from which it 
took a letter nine months of travel, by canoes 
and dog-sleds and Indian couriers, to reach him ; 
or it may be in any single household of the mil- 
lions of Christian families of all these races and 
nations. You ask the question, then, in any of 
the groups of these hundreds of millions of Chris- 
tian souls, whereabouts on earth their religion 
came from. Without hesitation, without vari- 
ation, they point you to a district, not large, well- 
defined, lying as much in open light as any other 
since the beginning of human history, accessi- 
ble and familiar always to travellers and chroni- 
clers. You ask from what time their Christian 
religion dates. They all answer, at once, undoubt- 
ingly, naming in figures a precise and definite 
epoch, or period, less in length than the lifetime 
of many individuals, easily determinable by com- 
parison with the reigns of contemporary Roman 
emperors or other historic characters, and with 
public transactions. You ask once more for 
the one essential item or element in their belief. 
Instantly, without exception, ever3^where, the 
millions of voices becoming one, they reply 
by pronouncing ONE NAME, of one Person, one 
man — what more than man we are not now 
inquiring — but THE man Jesus. They know, all 
of them, whatever else they know or are igno- 
rant of, in whom, in what one Person they believe. 
They know that he lived among men on the spot 



LECTURE FIRST. 



and at the time described. They know that of 
all that body of facts, or cluster of actual events, 
taking place in Judasa, in the five reigns of Au- 
gustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, 
that Person Avas the living spring, the originator, 
the authority, the mover, without Avhom nothing 
of the transactions would have been. They believe 
in this Person as a Saviour, through whom they 
are to have life forever. To him, Jesus, every 
knee bows ; every tongue confesses. 

Christendom is here, and knows that it is here ; 
and it knows full well whence it came. Science 
must find room for all the facts. Every effect has 
a cause. From this world-wide effect you move 
vStraight up, on an unbroken line, till you come to 
one spot. There is a child on a peasant Avoman's 
breast. There is the breath of cattle feeding. 
There is a story, in the streets, of an anthem, 
sung by angels, shaking the midnight air, heard 
by shepherds. Then come magi out of the 
heathen twilight, the unconscious prophets of a 
world worshipping the Son of man, whom it had 
waited for and wanted. The ground will be 
*' hard under your feet " — from effect to cause — all 
the way. The voice is to the sons of men. 

If, then, you are asked why you believe, and 
Avhy you do not join in some wild hunt of restless 
seekers after a religion of to-day, as thinking men 
to thinking men, as rational disciples of science, 
which is one of the daughters of God, speak the 
name of your living Lord, and answer that you 
could not believe otherwise if you would. Others 
of you, having found what that Friend is person- 



CHRIST AMONG MEN. 



ally to your secret life, and that there is no life, 
no love, no peace from every kind of pain, like 
his, no other remission of your sins, and no other 
security for life eternal with those you have loved 
here, will go farther and confess that you would 
not believe otherwise if you could, or glory save 
in him ! 

Unprofitable enough Avill be our retrospect 
of all this wide and wonderful movement of 
the Master across the earth — our speaking here 
and your hearing both — if the faith which has 
so risen and conquered has not come to your 
own heart and conquered its doubt and cast out 
its fear ! The living Christ has come to men. 
Have you, O man, or daughter of man, said, 
'' Come, Christ, to me !" Then '' A man. The 
Man, shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, 
and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water 
in a dry place, as the shadoAv of a great rock in a 
weary land." 



LECTURE II, 

&Uvxst gjeclarjexl to pCjetx of a "gnXst 

^^Iigi0XX5 (£nXtxxxc. Mt lauX 

at ^tUcns. 



"SS^ijoin tf)erefove ^t iflnorantlj toorsijip, \)m neclare K unto 

you/' — Acts 17:23. 

**?l5att) not €5olr niatie loolist) t{)e toisljoni of ti;is toovlD?" 

I CoK. 1 : 20. 



Ol^lixrist xXisd0Sje£ to ^tn 



OF A FALSE RELIGIOUS CULTURE.— ST. PAUL AT 
ATHENS. 

The proposition covering the g-round of these 
lectures is that t/ie religion of Christ is found to be 
true by its fitness to mankind. 

In the shortest possible summary, the proofs 
brought to support this claim, thus far, are that 
Christianity, from the outset, throws into wonder- 
ful prominence such truths and forces as meet 
the moral conditions, elevate the affections, and 
perfect the nature of men ; that, without hiding 
but rather revealing its divinity, it yet comes em- 
bodied in a human person, the only complete 
man ever seen on earth ; that in him every form 
of human life is touched and ennobled ; that this 
incarnated Gospel takes a natural hold of human- 
ity, especially in the great matters of its teaching, 
such as life, love, forgiveness ; that this identifica- 
tion of the religion and the person distinguishes 
the creed of the church from every other great 
religious or ethical system known in history ; and 
that the facts of the planting and spread of this 
belief, established on principles purely historical 
and scientific, leave no rational escape from the 



38 LECTURE SECOND. 

conclusion that whoever made men made both 
the Bible and the kingdom of Christ. 

We now go on to show how this religion, re- 
garded as a thing preached, or apostolized, in the 
highest grade of unchristian society, encountered 
the existing shapes of religious worship and 
thought, being suited supremely to what we may 
call, without disrespect to philosophy, man's fac- 
ulty of faith. 

St. Paul has entered Europe. In his apostolic 
person the Gospel now comes in contact with a 
new civilization and a foreign religion — a climate 
as alien to it, one might think, as the snows of 
Mount Olympus to the sunshine of Mount Zion. 
Yet underneath Syria and Macedonia alike, and the 
Mediterranean between them, is one and the same 
earth, and so under all the continents of human 
thought, and the seas of human feeling, is one 
humanity. Christ took it upon him, and there- 
fore to Asiatic and European, African and Ameri- 
can, Christ came in one Catholic Epiphany. 

No arrival on European soil ever carried with 
it the seeds of such revolutions — not the career 
of Minos, or Xerxes, or Alexander, or all of them 
together. The struggles of earthly sovereignties 
and sciences were to be overshadowed by the 
sudden collision of a kingdom from on high with 
those ideas and principalities which rule this 
world. The most salient incident in this west- 
ward migration of the Faith was its meeting with 
the Athenian mind at Mars' Hill, But even that, 
as we shall see, was only the crest of a wave 
which was to break all along the western lands. 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEX. 



Already, to some extent, this second stru2rc:le of 
the Gospel, its issue with heathenism, had been 
begun on the soil of Asia ]\linor. Now it rises 
into the chief place. The v.-rench that had loosen- 
ed the bands of a local and national relisfion from 

o 

the limbs of the young church at Antioch was to 
be consummated in a more complete liberating 
of it at Athens. For that reason we are the 
more impressed to find that, after crossing the 
Gulf, the apostle, indefatigable as ever in seek- 
ing his Hebrew countrymen for Christ, in spite* of 
all their hatred, and though just escaped from the 
Thessalonian persecution, still clings to his habit 
of proclaiming the message first to the dispersed 
of Israel before he turns to the Gentile. " There- 
fore disputed he daily in the synagogue with the 
Jews." 

If any proof were wanted of his quickness to 
distinguish between fair conciliation and cowardly 
compromise, and of his stiffness against all con- 
cession the moment it w^ent so far as to obliterate 
the lines of dosfmatic truth, we have it in the life- 
long polemic attitude of his whole mind towards 
the Judaizers. This traditional and ritualistic party 
in the church was made up, remember, of Chris- 
tians, and often of an ardent and aggressive type. 
One of their chief arguments for adhering to 
ceremonial precedents was that it might bring in 
gradually the entire old Israel into the Body of 
Christ. They contrasted contemptuously the 
value of a Gentile convert and a Jewish proselyte 
— having it for a foregone conclusion that one 
man circumcised was worth at least ten evangeli- 



40 LECTURE SECOND. 

cals without that patriarchal sacrament. Even 
the conciliar decision at Jerusalem, dispensing 
with circumcision, only partially controlled this 
exclusive policy. Besides, the Judaizer had his 
texts. If all nations were to call the Son of Mary 
blessed, yet the word was to go forth from Zion ; 
if the Light of the Cross was to lighten the Gen- 
tiles, nevertheless salvation is of the Jews ; if the 
law was to be somehow superseded, so was it all 
to be somehow fulfilled. Would it not, then, be 
advance enough from this Christian Judaism that it 
was a Judaism whose Messiah had already come ? 
In short, the case on that side was made up in the 
alleged interest of the Gospel. Would there be 
an acuteness sharp and incisive enough, as well as 
a language venturesome enough, to cut the fallacy 
asunder ? It was then as it is commonly ; the most 
plausible pretext for adulterating the chaste truth 
as it is in Jesus, or for veiling its severer expression, 
was that such breadth would set forward the cause 
by humoring the popular prepossessions which 
occupied the field. It is the plea of the tempor- 
izer as against the martyr ; of the politician as 
against the statesman ; of the man of expedients 
and party as against the man of faith. 

You see the connection with my argument. 
Had Christianity come to be the religion of one 
race, or of the world ? of the Jew, or of man ? 
The Jew, to be sure, is a man ; but man cannot 
always be a Jew. If the Gospel is said to be true 
because it suits humanity, and then if one type of 
man monopolizes it, even though he got his cere- 
monial and his laAV once from heaven, the logic 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 41 

breaks. St. Paul, the apostle chosen to that 
end, shall deal with that dilemma. He has too 
clear a sight of the real breadth and freedom of 
both the spirit and the constitution of the church 
of the living God to be bewildered for an instant 
by the sophistry that would dwarf it down — 
this Christian Jerusalem that lieth foursquare 
like the superb quadrilateral of Lombardy, with 
its twelve gates open — into a Palestinian sect ; 
and so, after the tremendous manner of his em- 
phasis, he shuts the door of accommodation in 
that direction tight : ''If ye be circumcised, 
Christ shall profit you nothing." " Ye are not 
under the law." '' The letter killeth." '' Be not 
entangled with any such yoke of bondage." 

This Gospel is for ina7t — for Gentile man, for 
magi as well as shepherds, for the man of the 
West no less than for the man of the East, for 
Paul the missionary of the Mediterranean as 
much as for Saul of Tarsus at the feet of Gama- 
liel. Just at this crisis of the Faith we meet him 
disembarking at the gate of another continent. 
He reaches the seat of the second of the two 
schools of faulty religious culture, which, from the 
first, have outwardly narrowed or inwardly cor- 
rupted the breadth and simplicity that are in 
Christ. 

The question will be. Whether these oppositions 
qualify or contradict our position, that human 
nature wants the Gospel, and finally, in the long- 
run, is satisfied only in Christ. It might go far 
to answer that question, and in the negative, 
that the same New Testament, the word of Christ 



42 LECTURE SECOND. 

himself and his apostles, which appeals, to man 
to accept and obey it by his free faith, clearly an- 
ticipates and foretells both these two natural op- 
ponents of its rule. 

There are two historically prominent types of 
distortion — the externalizing and the rationalizing, 
ceremony and opinion — reverence for the con- 
crete, outward, visible rehgious thing, and rever- 
ence for the unseen spirit or the abstract relig- 
ious idea. In ethics, or matters of conscience, 
they appear respectively as literalism and liberty ; 
in metaphysics, as common-sense guided by per- 
ception, and transcendentalism trusting to intui- 
tion ; and in the cultus of worship they diverge 
naturally into the aesthetic or ceremonial " cele- 
bration" on the one hand, and into the subjective 
'' state," or inward experience, whether specula- 
tive or mystical, according as intellect or emotion 
predominates, on the other. One, OprfCDxaia, finds 
religion as a fact in history and in life ; the other, 
yvGDffi?, finds it as a conception or a sentiment in 
the mind. The one disciple scarcely recognizes 
religion except as he sees and touches it in the 
church. The other consents to admit a church 
as an unessential and variable accessory to his 
religion. It is not unusual, and perhaps not un- 
fair, to characterize the two principles as tenden- 
cies to opposite heresies. Might it not be as well, 
however, to call them the exaggerations of two 
half-truths, ever}^ half-truth being always in effect, 
though not in intent, of the nature of a heres}' — in 
the original sense of that word — till the other half 
comes and is placed by its side to make a whole? 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 43 

Limited and controlled, Christianity is not only 
large enough and willing to include them both, 
but, as a catholic necessity, it must include them. 
That they both have a surprising facility of break- 
ing from their allegiance, especially if organized 
and drilled into party, is plain enough not only 
from history all along, but from the fact that we 
find them both beside the cradle of the Christian 
church, and in the apostolic and sub-apostolic age 
threatening the very life of the new-born child. 

St. Paul deals with the first, Judaism, the party 
of precedent, as we have seen, on what may be 
called the native soil of the Christian king- 
dom, among his kinsmen according to the flesh, 
" whose are the adoption, and the glory, and 
the covenants, and the giving of the law." He 
meets the second squarely when he lands at the 
Pirasus. That short voyage was more than a pas- 
sage from one to another continent. He has 
emigrated from one to another world of thought. 
He has sailed away from Mosaic institutions, 
Abrahamic covenants, and theocratic colorings of 
social order, save as he carries them, a Hebrew 
of the Hebrews, in his own blood. The syna- 
gogue looks smaller, the old capital — '* beautiful 
for situation" — recedes, and the turrets of the 
Temple sink behind the rim of the sea. Hence- 
forth, with a wider horizon, but on terribly 
blighted ground, a new work has to be done with 
new instruments. Contrary to the prediction of 
the Judaists, the incoming Gentile accession was 
to be by far the more important. Epiphany 
prophecies of a missionary age were to begin to 



44 LECTURE SECOND. 

be fulfilled. All Europe, and an American child 
out of its loins larger than itself— the future of 
both being hidden yet under the forests — were to 
yield their myriads of baptized disciples to be 
" fellow-heirs of the same body." 

The seed-grain laid up in the ark was to sprout 
into a tree to heal the nations, and grow by a 
broader sweep. How broad should it be? Of 
what streams should it drink } Should it offer an 
indiscriminate shelter and a promiscuous hospital- 
ity ? One thing is clear. Directly in the path of 
the new Cause stood a huge figure of Idolatry, 
a sword in his hand, animal lusts boiling in his 
veins, altars smoking with impure fires all round 
him. Of this muscular pagan giant Athens was 
the brain. Whatever they might borrow, by 
way of Alexandria, where all the three leading 
Gnostics appeared, from the genius of Philo, from 
the Oriental imagination, or even from the liter- 
ary treasures of the Old Testament, the Greek 
schools of philosophy, as the Gospel found them, 
had come of an essentially independent stock. 
They represent the purely natural or non-Chris- 
tian working of the human mind, sufficient to 
itself, headstrong, not without inborn religious 
instincts, but not subject to revealed authority ; 
with no object for faith, no Sitn of righteousness 
risen upon it ; polytheistic here, pantheistic there, 
atheistic elsewhere, but restless and wretched 
everywhere, either w^alking in a chilly light 
or wallowing in a sty of sensuality, as tempera- 
ment and climate might condition it. Classi- 
cal usage shows that in the complimentary word 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 45 

used by the apostle in this address, rendered '' too 
superstitious," there was implied a meaning of 
fear, the apprehensive presentiment of evil in con- 
nection with religion, which ran all through the 
heathen mind, and which especially threw a dark 
shade over all its faint expectations of a future 
life, making rather dreadful than attractive that 
Hereafter for which the Gospel publishes the 
cheerful tidings of atonement and peace. 

We want to know precisely what this diseased 
condition was to which Paul spoke. It was not, 
as so many expositors have supposed, that anoma- 
lous mixture and monstrosity to which the Zoroas- 
trian, the Egyptian, probably the Buddhist, and 
certainly the cabalistic rabbi all contributed their 
fantasies ; not that notion of emanations, w^hich 
the apostle probably did have in mind as '' gen- 
ealogies'* when he afterwards wrote the Pastoral 
Epistles, as the angel-worship which he re- 
bukes to the Colossians, or the '' science, falsely 
so-called," against which he warns St. Timothy, 
and the '' knowledge which puffeth up" ('* Hellen- 
istic smoke" is Chrysostom's expression), which 
he denounces to the Corinthians ; no, it was stark 
heathenism, half rationalistic and half afraid of 
gods — an intellectual worldliness haunted by 
dreams of judgment. This formed the second 
antagonist to the faith of Christ, and it was this 
that sat enthroned on the Athenian Areopagus 
surrounded by altars. 

What is remarkable, and what brings the mat- 
ter home to us here, is this : in one of those cir- 
cular movements of thought which have been 



46 LECTURE SECOND. 

often known in the world, it is the same antago- 
nist, in substance, which has sprung- up even under 
the sunlight of Christianity, and is in France, in 
Great Britain, in Germany, in America to-day — 
only that now it proposes to allow Christianity, 
stripped of its divine insignia, and emasculated of 
its supernatural vigor, to hold a place, as a sort 
of religio licita^ in a corner of its eclectic Pan- 
theon ; patronizing the prophet and his parables, 
but rejecting the Redeemer on his cross ; not alto- 
gether unlike the Athenians themselves, who saw 
in the foreign preacher only *' a setter forth of 
strange gods, because he preached unto them 
Jesus and the resurrection." 

Who is he, then, that shall carry and defend 
The Faith against this its second foe ? The 
same, it appears, who, as we have seen, would not 
suffer it to be walled up in a synagogue or strait- 
ened or stiffened into a sect. He must be, for 
this special vocation, a man who knows some- 
thing of the peculiar and subtle forms of mental 
activity with which he will have to deal. A pro- 
vincial birthplace adds to his Jewish training un- 
der Gamaliel some affinities with Grecian spec- 
ulation. He has talked with Stoics probably at 
Tarsus — for they were there — and has mastered a 
scholarship extensive enough to embrace not only 
the Aristotelian dialectics, but lyric poets no bet- 
ter known to the modern Greek student than 
Menander and Epimenides. Roman citizenship 
affords him the advantage of cosmopolitan man- 
ners. Experience with all sorts of people, a sin- 
gular sagacity in seizing on oratorical points sug- 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 47 

gested by personal peculiarities as well as the 
surprises of popular assemblies ; and, lastly, a 
fortitude which there was no scourge sharp 
enough or dungeon dark enough to terrify, 
from Syria to Spain — these are but accessories to 
the original, acute, energetic, versatile, incisive, 
capacious mind, which, by common consent, has 
not been overmatched anywhere at any time. 

Will there be any here, my brethren, so bold as 
to disparage learning in the Christian minister, or 
ready to reduce among us the standard of liter- 
ary requirement in candidates for it ? We claim 
it here as one of the very proofs that our Christian- 
ity suits whatever is of the Maker in man, that it 
welcomes his highest intellectual service, accepts 
the gifts of his learning, and crowns them with its 
consecration. Disparage the accomplishments of 
the scholar we might indeed, but for what we 
behold along with and above them. For they are 
all in this man so completely penetrated by one 
solemn conviction, so saturated with one holy 
affection, so crowned and glorified with loyalty to 
one Personal Leader, that he could say, into what- 
ever city or company he came, *' Now, then, it is 
no more I — with whatever honors of moral and in- 
tellectual manhood you may cover me — it is no 
more /that live, but Christ liveth in me." 

We have the Gospel again embodied in a man, 
not the divine Man, but as completely furnished 
a specimen of man purely human as antiquity 
affords, and Christianity suits him exactly in 
every fibre and gift. 

Stand with him at Mars' Hill. Before him were 



48 LECTURE SECOND. 

spokesmen of two systems: ''Certain philoso- 
phers of the Stoics and of the Epicureans en- 
countered him." We are not to suppose from 
the express mention of these two that there was 
any special relation between either or both of 
them to the teachings of St. Paul. I recall with 
great interest a conversation of the lamented and 
genial Greek Professor Felton, at Cambridge, after 
his return from the East, in which he referred to 
having detected, while standing on that hill, with 
the Book of the Acts open in his hand, one of the 
''undesigned coincidences," worthy to be placed 
with those of Blunt or Paley, which the more con- 
firm the narrative the more concealed they lie. It 
was evident, he said, that the two schools named — 
Stoic and Epicurean — were referred to simply 
from the accident of their proximity to the spot. 
The gardens of Epicurus lay on the south-west, 
near the bed of the Ilissus, where the founder 
arranged the lovely scenery of his instructions, 
bequeathing the grounds afterwards to his follow- 
ers on condition that they should keep them con- 
secrated to learning, and observe there a 3^early 
festival to his memory. Not far eastward, within 
the very enclosure of the Agora, was the cloister 
which Zeno the Stoic had transformed from the 
seat of a symposium of poets into a lecture-hall of 
Stoic morality — that stern delusion which aspired 
to be indifferent to evil, not knowing it as sin but 
despising it as weakness, endeavoring to substi- 
tute for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the cheer- 
less resistance of a stubborn human will. 

Take notice, there were two other forms of phil- 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 49 

osophy, both of which would seem to have much 
more in common with the profound doctrines of 
Christ and the Resurrection ; why were not their 
representatives drawn also about this solemn 
foreigner who had deeper things on his lips than 
either of the two great pupils of Socrates could tell ? 
For the commonplace reason, as Professor Felton 
observed, that the Lyceum, with the walks of the 
Peripatetics, was situated away at the north-east ; 
while in a different direction still, and so far out 
as to be suburban, grew the olive groves of the 
Academy. It only happened that they who were 
in sight of the market-place saw the stir of the 
concourse occasioned by the striking stranger, 
and went out to inquire what new excitement had 
come. 

Blend Zeno and Plato together, and you have 
the pantheist of pure reason ; not the unqualified 
pantheist who quite denies a primal Deity from 
which all lower life flows, not the gross panthe- 
ist that Augustine describes, believing in a God 
who pervades the universe as honey pervades the 
comb in the hive, and not merely the pantheist 
of antiquity, but the pantheist of intellectual 
self-sufficiency. We have him close by us, for he 
moves up and down the land from one lecture- 
stand to another, Stoic or Sybarite as may hap- 
pen in temperament, a Platonist or a Lucretian in 
philosophy, brilliant and eloquent perhaps, unit- 
ing to an almost passionless purity many a grace 
that has been borrowed — with interest unpaid — 
from the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. To 
the Stoic at Athens, as at Paris, London, Philadel- 



50 LECTURE SECOND. 

phia, the preaching of the resurrection would be 
eminently '' foolishness ;" for though he might 
understand something of the cross, regarded as 
a sublime sign of human martyrdom, he held, 
according to Ritter, that the soul, being itself 
material, is either consumed at death or loses its 
personality by absorption. Even the scenes of 
the crucifixion, with their divine tenderness and 
human sensibility, would be all remote from the 
apathetic endurance of a scheme w^hose two lead- 
ers died by their own hands, and which can wel- 
come no Saviour because its pride acknowledges 
no sicknesses to be healed, and no sins to be for- 
given. As to Epicurus, when the maxims of 
Positivism — whose modern doctrine of responsi- 
bility is a singular reproduction of the old Epi- 
cureanism — shall become popularized, none of us 
here can doubt, I suppose, that they will spread 
the same narcotic poison over the conscience that 
brooded in the atmosphere of the Athenian gar- 
den. 

The Peripatetic sought the knowledge of things ; 
the Platonist, the reason of things ; the Stoic, 
superiority and indifference to things ; the Epi- 
curean, the enjoyment of things. In mixtures 
very various, and more and more as open enemies 
to the cross of Christ, they are all here at our 
door. If we take, as we surely may without vio- 
lence, the porch as standing for the party of a 
Christless morality, the garden for a Christless 
pleasure, the lyceum for a Christless science, and 
the academy for a Christless religious culture, we 
shall have four incredulous critics which every 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN, 5 1 



preacher and pastor has to see before him, to 
question or to answer, and to try with all his 
might to convince and convert, as he stands up, 
Sunday by Sunday, to preach '' Jesus and the 
resurrection." 

The lounging religion-mongers who waited that 
day about the ordinary resorts for a new sensa- 
tion were sure to find it in this fresh thinker, with 
his startling ideas and crisp discourse. He is 
taken to the Areopagus, some writers have im- 
agined to overawe him with the august memo- 
ries of the tribunal where so many judicial sen- 
tences had been pronounced ; others think to 
provide him a more appropriate pulpit ; but 
more probably than either, as a kind of practical 
witticism in the grotesque contrast between the 
futile fanatic they took him to be and this solid 
bench of public justice — certainly not for a reg- 
ular trial, which nothing in the narrative sug- 
gests. The apostle moves up the stone steps 
without dismay, meekly conscious that, in his 
weak bodily presence, before he has done, Christ's 
strength will be made sufficiently perfect — the 
only strength any true preacher ever feels within 
him ; sure that it shall be given him in that same 
hour what he shall speak ; he the real master of 
all the masters that have led their pupils along 
those streets, and they the '* babblers ;" he the 
steadfast witness, steady as the rock where he 
stands ; they the feathers '' tossed to and fro with 
every wind of doctrine." 

At the very beginning of the address we hear 
an accent of conciliation ; but it is conciliation 



52 LECTURE SECOND. 

prompted by something holier than policy or the 
success of his speech. To St. Paul Jesus Christ 
is so much more than all successes that the con- 
verting to him of a single soul subordinates every 
other purpose ; and to that end no honest conces- 
sion, no sacrifice of taste, no rhetorical pains, shall 
be spared. To his eyes men exist only to have 
Christ formed in them ^' the hope of glory." 
We come now to our fundamental proposition, 
lying, as I said, under all the continents of thought, 
the seas of diverse feeling, the shifting climates of 
men's manners. When the apostle utters the 
dignified salutation, *' Ye men of Athens," the 
thought burns in him that every one of these 
men is capable of the great salvation. How 
shall he reach them ? Is there one common 
idea or feeling between him and them that he 
can transmute into a living link to convey to 
them this grace of God and this gift of eternal 
life ? Already these assembling crowds have 
learnt that he has come over the sea as the advo- 
cate of a foreign religion. Shall some false pride 
or foolish audacity in him widen, at the first 
stroke, the distance, and repel or exasperate 
them ? He is to tell them %vJiat kind of men they 
are ; he knows that they are fickle, frivolous, su- 
perficial heathen men ; and he has courage enough 
to say that out if he will. They have provoked 
and insulted him ; he who could stand before 
kings and councils, making a Felix tremble, can, 
if he is so minded, repay ridicule with scorn. He 
begins, as you know, with that most candid and 
graceful tribute, which the singular infelicity of 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 53 

our version so nearly perverts and so completely 
hides : '' Ye, too, Athenians, are men whose minds 
are very religious, eminently curious about dei- 
ties," 6ei(nSaifAov£irepoi. '' My own eyesight," he 
says, *' bears witness that what so many travellers 
have said of you is true. For as I passed by and 
beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this 
inscription, * To the Unknown God ! ' " Here, 
then, is established at once a certain bond of com- 
mon feeling. But lo ! how slender it is ! Their 
"religion"? Why, was it not the very saddest 
of all the features of their life ? the very abomina- 
tion that just now had so mightily stirred his 
spirit ? Yet out of it he will pluck materials and 
proofs of the energetic conclusions he has to pro- 
claim. He will even take a text cut on one of 
their idolatrous altars, if he can thereby win and 
gain and save one sinner for whom his Saviour 
died. 

Before an educated assembly like this, it would 
be superfluous to go over the aspects of the Athe- 
nian streets as St. Paul passed through them. 
Ancient and modern topographers enable even 
untravelled students to follow him, step by step, 
from the Peiraic gate to the Acropolis, catching, 
at every movement of the eye, some recognized 
image — the sculptured monument of some well- 
known divinity in a blind and polluted poly- 
theism. Altar succeeds to altar. Temple rises 
above temple. Commemorated orators, artists, 
tragedians, soldiers, men of ill-employed strength, 
women of wicked beaut}^ stood as the stone sen- 
tinels or seducers of a still vital idolatry. There 



54 LECTURE SECOND, 

was a Latin satire that it was easier to find a god 
in Athens than a man. An " altar" would seem 
to have been the one thing there that the apos- 
tle could not name without a cry of indignant 
lamentation. 

His searching glance sees one not mentioned by 
other explorers. They have indeed noticed some 
traces of an adoration approaching that which ar- 
rested this quick-sighted missionary's attention ; 
for they tell us of several shrines erected to mere 
abstractions of the mind — to Energy and Per- 
suasion, to Oblivion and to Fame, and, Avhat 
seemed least likely of all, even to Pity. In the 
upward grade of religious aspiration these are 
evidently at but one remove from the " altar to 
the unknown God." 

Whichever of the disputed accounts we accept 
of the origin and sense of the inscription — even 
though we take Jerome's reading as the true one, 
which makes the noun plural, including all sup- 
posable and undiscovered deities — the craving of 
the unsatisfied soul which it so pathetically pleads 
is essentially the same. There is one unansivered 
want in their bewildered hearts, and it is felt. 
Yes, man is there, as well as altars. That is 
enough. On that one solitary surviving shred of 
the divine workmanship in their nature Paul rests 
his hope of raising them j^et, a regenerated peo- 
ple, into the kingship and priesthood of the fel- 
lowship of saints. 

The verse I have quoted follows. As I take it, 
it is a key that opens the zvorld of unbelief and sin to 
the zvhole heavenly life and poivcr of the Gospel of 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 55 

Christ, It unlocks the inner door by which God's 
revelation enters the spirit of man. " Whom 
therefore ye ignorantly worship." " Whom there- 
fore ye worship unknowing" (it is only another 
inflection of the same verb with the '' unknown," 
applied to the God of the sentence before, and 
therefore embodies only the Greek's own confes- 
sion) — '' him," this *' '■ unknown,' declare I unto 
you." That is, Christ the God-man brings the God 
he incarnates to that in man which needs and is 
enabled to receive him. The Gospel alone *' finds" 
and fills the want. To interpret that want into 
a desire, to excite and direct the desire, is the 
first office in order of the Christian preacher. 
No grown man is saved till he feels in him this 
want ; when he feels it, as really a want of Christ's 
salvation, he begins to be saved, because the 
sense of sin is the first movement to faith. Were 
there no reaching and feeling after God, there 
would be no free reception of a free redemption, 
no coming to Christ. Hence, however he does 
it, by whatever one or more than one of the thou- 
sand evangelic methods that are open to him, 
reaching all the way from the most attractive ex- 
hibitions of God's love to the most terrible uncov- 
ering of his Judgment, he unquestionably is the 
successful preacher who so goes first to the roots 
of human weakness and depravity as to rouse 
into unquenchable life in man the longing after 
God. Him — whom the world unknowingly ac- 
knowledges and worships — declare we unto it as 
the God in Christ, warning and encouraging 
every man. 



56 LECTURE SECOND. 



The analysis of the sermon at Mars' Hill has 
been so often undertaken, from Chrysostom down, 
that perhaps every ray of light which can be 
thrown to and fro between its several clauses, for 
their mutual elucidation, has become familiar to 
the Biblical student. The speech contains eight 
sentences. Dr. Bentley, in the second of his 
Boyle Lectures on Atheism, Dean Milman, in his 
History, and Mr. Stanley, in his Oxford Sermons, 
have gone particularly into its negative bearing, 
as a refutation of existing opinions. It is certainly 
striking that up to that point in the discourse 
where the speaker touches on the miracle of the 
resurrection, each idea and expression he utters 
in order will find one or another powerful pagan 
party assenting to it ; while every such party, in 
some other portion, would find its tenets traversed 
and its maxims denied. Thus the whole listening 
assembly would be held in a marvellously skilful 
balance throughout, till, at last, the distinctive 
and crucial doctrine, which he is there especially 
to publish, dissolves this temporary truce, and a 
general outburst of derision breaks up the audi- 
ence. After all, however, what most concerns us 
and all Christendom in these compact and weighty 
words is their positive affirmations, irrespective of 
all temporary or local phases of human thought. 
These affirmations are five : i. The absolute unity, 
spirituality, and self-existent personality of the 
true God, as the object of Christian worship, and 
the prime fact of the Christian creed ; 2. The 
origin of the universe in his creatorship, as the 
foundation of the redemption, or new creation as 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 57 

the inheritance of the second Adam ; 3. The per- 
petual providence, or ceaseless supply of life and 
love to this creation, as the foundation of practical 
religion ; 4. The universal brotherhood and unity 
of the race of man, encompassing all the divinely 
appointed bounds of national habitation, as the 
foundation for the catholicity of the church ; and, 
5. The fact of a literal and personal resurrection 
into glory, through the risen Redeemer, with the 
correlative fact of a retributive judgment. The 
amazing compass of these brief statements, com- 
bined with their subtile adaptation to the various 
shades of speculation and feeling on the spot, to- 
gether with their logical consecutiveness, and their 
rhetorical beauty, including their graceful citation 
of a line of verse from Aratus, found also almost 
word for word in Cleanthes, these make up the 
marvel of this Christian oration, matchless among 
all the orators. Nothing from the apostle better 
justifies Luther's hyperbole, '' The words of St. 
Paul are not dead words ; they are living creatures 
and have hands and feet." ^ 

* One further expository suggestion only — if it may be par- 
doned — is offered, not having the support, so far as I know, of 
any of the critics. They have universally accounted for the re- 
ference to the " one blood," or unity of the race, by the arrogant 
pretension of the Greeks to be an independent national product* 
sprung up on their own soil — avroxOove's. Is it not, however, as 
likely — since t/ie Jew, wherever he came, was known to hold an 
offensive sense of superiority, and since, as Benlley himself ad- 
mits, the same claim of a separate origin was set up by several 
other ancient tribes besides the Greeks — that this was only an- 
other of the apostle's conciliatory overtures, to soften prejudice, 
to widen the ground of mutual good-will, towards a better wel- 
come for the doctrine he has yet in reserve to deliver? 



58 LECTURE SECOND. 

The discourse ended, the day's customary ex- 
citement dies away, and the novelty-loving city 
grows still. When Xenophon relates the recep- 
tion of the news of the Greek defeat in this same 
metropolis, at the end of the Peloponnesian war, 
he writes, with simple pathos, that *' No one slept 
in Athens that night." *'^ Had there been a deeper 
penetration into the true hiding-places of a peo- 
ple's strength, and the real signs of the times 
a more awful and anxious vigil would have been 
kept there, now that, by one day's preaching, the 
Gospel of an everlasting commonwealth, which 
subdues and outlasts all earthly empires, had vir- 
tually conquered pagan philosophy at its centre, 
unseating it from its stronghold.f 

* See Wordsworth's "Athens and Attica." The earlier and 
original authorities as to the localities and their historical and 
mythological illustrations are the ten "Books of the Itinerary" 
of Pausanias and Cicero's Letters. 

\ A Continental commentator has said that Paul never 
preached with less fruit than at Athens. Can we dare say that 
he ever preached with more? The moderately-sized church 
standing to-day on the Areopagus, dedicated to Dionysius, the 
solitary male convert, to be sure, who is mentioned in the narra- 
tive by name, the first bishop of Athens, is but an inadequate 
symbol of the "sound that has gone out into all the earth" 
from that single sermon. They that search anxiously for 
historical parallels find that it was on the very rock where 
Paul lifted up the banner of the cross for the western world that 
the Persians pitched their encampment when they besieged the 
Acropolis ; and that, while Xerxes attempted ineffectually to bum 
out the Greek worship by setting fire to its temples, Paul under- 
mined it in the minds of its worshippers ; so that the Parthenon 
itself, still standing, was at last ennobled by the preaching of 
another "wisdom and power," and converted into a kind of sanc- 
tuary of the Son of God. 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 59 

The great scene at Mars' Hill passes from our 
view, but not the mighty evidence it yields that, 
in every nation, humanity at its highest and best, 
its loftiest culture and keenest vision of nature, is 
yet a creature born to worship, never at rest till it 
rests at the cross, finding the Father through the 
Son. '•'■ Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, 
him declare I unto you," is the ceaseless cry of the 
Gospel, ''till we all come in the knowledge of 
the Son of God unto a perfect man!''' 

All round us, among those who will not welcome 
"the truth as it is in Jesus," there are living signs 
of a religious sensibility, tenacious witnesses in 
the soul that it somehow seeks the Shepherd, feel- 
ing blindly after him, while it is sought by him. 
Every Christian minister will recognize them ; any 
penetrating eye can discover them. The spon- 
taneous acknoAvledgments of God that spring to 
the lips of irreligious persons in swift and unpre- 
meditated syllables ; the awe that falls on the 
spirits of skeptics in great sorrows or terrible pro- 
vidences ; the prevalent desire of profane parents 
to have their children taught at church ; the send- 
ing for the clergyman in mortal sickness, or at the 
burial of the dead, by scoffers ; irrepressible pray- 
ers ; a lingering respect for Christian ordinances, 
which is not mere fear of public opinion ; the 
power of Sunday, which is more than secular over 
even secular minds ; an almost universal deference 
to the words of Scripture, which is neither intel- 
lectual nor superstitious — each of these is one of 
those altars to the unknoiun God which stand on 
every side of us, their very inconsistency with the 



6o LECTURE SECOND. 

unchristian life joined with them making them 
only the more impressive confirmations of the 
want of all the sons of men for the Son of Man. 

Through the streets of Paris, not long ago, 
there moved out to Pere la Chaise a funeral pro- 
cession of atheists. It halted by an open grave. 
There was no hymn ; for atheism was never yet set 
to music ; no prayer, for when atheism has time 
to consider it remembers that a supplication sent 
into the air is either an absurdity or a surrender. 
Into that grave was let down the mortal part — 
all, those faithless mourners would have said — of 
a woman of wit and beauty, the admired sibyl 
of a well-known brilliant pagan communistic ora- 
cle speaking through France. There was a eu- 
logy. The orator praised the dead, recommended 
communism, pronounced creation a dream, and 
argued that there is no immortality and no God. 
Reaching the climax of his impassioned pane- 
gyric, swept by the intensity of an extemporaneous 
French enthusiasm beyond the bounds of an arti- 
ficial materialism, he tossed the flowers in his hand 
upon the cofhn-lid before him, exclaiming, " Pass 
on, fair spirit, God is waiting to receive thee ! " To 
the stumbling, stammering, mourning children of 
humanity in Parisian streets, at the entry of the 
city, in human habitations, by open graves, Chris- 
tendom cries, in the wisdom of Christ, "" Unto you, 
O men ! I call. Whom ye ignorantly worship, him 
declare I unto you." 

We too, here, have all one human heart. Look 
down into that. In its deepest places are there 
no facts that cry out for Christ, and so bear per- 



CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 6 1 

petual testimony to his coming? What do you 
make, O unbeliever, of yourself ? " How readest 
thou," not thy Bible, but thy own breast, that 
Bible in thee, with its Old Testament of law and 
its New Testament of love ? Look again. There 
is conscience, with all its bitter accusations. There 
is remorse, with its uncomforted agonies. There 
is affection, with its infinite, mysterious capacities 
of pain. There is an instinct of Judgment, fore- 
boding greater possible miseries to come. There 
is aspiration, longing for unattained heights and 
glories of a more perfect life — all a riddle without 
interpretation if there is no Divine Man. There 
is bereavement moaning at the fresh grave, in- 
quiring, *' If a man die, shall he live again?" 
There is the natural want of worship, kindling its 
altars all over the round world, listening for a voice 
from the sky. There is the restless and perpetual 
" feeling after God," if haply it may find him. 
What do they all mean? Whence come they? 
Whither do they reach? Under these familiar 
words lie all the tragedy and glory, the shame or 
the splendor, the death or the life of the soul of 
man. What would all Athenian knowledge and art 
be worth to you or me, which, after it had reaped 
its splendid harvests in all the fields of nature, 
knew no Lord at whose feet it could lay these 
treasures down ? 



LECTURE III. 



ilBlji^Xijet ^\xt "mioxia xoxtUont 



" ^nlr to|)eix tf)C2 sato i)im, tl)e^ h)orsl)ippet> |)mr ; but some 

iJOUlltclr/* — Matt. 8 : 17. 

**^nli some Jjeliebcti tje tfjittfls b)1)icf) luere spofeen, anU some 
i)eliebeti not/'— Acts 28 : 24. 

*' Sri)e toorlD iifi toistiom feneto trot ©foX . . . iTor tje Setos 
require a sifln, anti tl)e CKreetts seefe after toisUom : tout toe preac!) 
€:i)rist crucifi'eti, unto t!)e Jfctos a stumbIinfl=l)loctt, anti unto tfje 
©Jreefts foolishness ; but unto tjjem to!)ic!) are ralleU, boti) S^tos 
ann CKreefts, <a:f)vist, tje jiotoer of ©Jolr, anH tje toisHom of ©foU/'— 

1 Cor. 1 : 21-29 



Cttrist in iht ^xtscnct of 

Three questions lie directly across the path of 
thought where we are moving. They must be an- 
swered, unless we are willing to come to a one- 
sided and loose conclusion. 

Granted that the faith of Christ is fitted to 
mankind, how do we know that the world, without 
Christ, w^ould not have reached, in some way, what 
Christ has brought? What are we to make 
of the fact that, when he and his religion have 
come, some minds have always doubted, and 
others have vigorously disbelieved ? And, in the 
propagation of this Faith, why has the progress 
been partial and unequal ? These difficulties chal- 
lenge explanation. Inquiry is of the intellect ; 
and we shall find, I believe, that though it is as a 
thinking creature that man first raises the doubt, 
yet afterwards, if he is fair and thinks on, he 
brings the value of his doubt to trial. 

Before you is a piece of mechanism ; it lies in 
the daylight. It is complicated ; it is of durable 
material ; it is of magnificent dimensions, and of 
many delicate adjustments. The machine is 
Examining it, you are certain of two 



66 LECTURE THIRD. 

things: that it was meant to do a particular 
work, and that it is doing that work badly. We 
all say, then. Something is wanting. There ap- 
pears at our side a man who, by his language and 
his touch, seems to understand the principle and 
the construction. He speaks as if he might have 
been the builder. A probability arises in our 
minds that he can remedy the defects which he 
points out, and can accomplish a vast and gradual 
improvement in the operation, looking with prom- 
ise to its final perfection. He makes the experi- 
ment. We come there at a later day, and we 
find a manifest reduction of the jars and fail- 
ures, with a marvellous increase of the original 
power of the contrivance. If we have common 
sense and common candor, we shall say. This 
mending or remaking is due to that mender or 
remaker. Here are cause and effect. His claim 
to the belief of machinists and of all people is 
justified. It matters nothing at all what theories 
the most ingenious minds may frame about the 
origin, or the nature, or the proper cure, of the 
disorder in the mechanism. It matters nothing 
now whether certain accounts and letters written 
about this person were in every respect correct, 
or have been properly copied and kept. It mat- 
ters still less whether the opinions of certain dis- 
tinguished engineers as to the intentions of this 
master or the performance of his subordinates and 
successors are warranted'. The thing wanted was 
done. There stands the restored construction — 
visible, tangible, solid-, and running well. That 
master restored it. 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 67 

I do no dishonor to human nature when I so 
figure it as a product of intelligent design. Be- 
fore that Life appeared which was lived between 
Bethlehem and Calvary, it was the mechanism in 
disorder, the instrument out of tune. We are now 
to trace the proofs that the hand which healed 
was the hand that made it. Drop, then, the me- 
chanical figure. There is a spirit in man, and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him under- 
standing. 

I. We shall have to admit that till Christ comes 
man does not find what he needs or even know 
by his understanding what he wants. As the 
Master of Humanity, Christ first interprets the 
want, and makes it consciously distinct before 
he satisfies it. This law is seen to govern the 
Saviour's ministry to persons in Judea, both in 
miracle and teaching ; and it appears with equal 
brightness in all the vast historical movements by 
which he draws the race into his kingdom. 

Any exhaustive enumeration of the signs of dis- 
order in the non-Christian world, signs that human 
nature without the Saviour worked badly, is be- 
yond the limits of these lectures. I can only af- 
firm to my audience that the sources of accurate 
and definite knowledge on that first point are 
accessible, and that all trustworthy scholarship is 
agreed as to their authenticity.* On these we 
may rest several distinct propositions, made neces- 

* The most recent accurate account of the public and pri- 
vate life of human society at the advent of Christ, from original 
sources of information, may be -found in Prof. Fisher's ** Be 
ginnings of Christianity." 



68 LECTURE THIRD. 

sarily concise, touching for the most part the 
greater subjects of man's intellectual concern. 

You will observe that amidst the entire circuit 
of that heathen life there run two streams : first, 
the broad river of moral and intellectual failure, 
but parallel with that, or amidst it, a slender 
and yet persevering and most striking current of 
human longing for something better — aspirations 
for an unattained illumination, springing from 
a haunting consciousness of some hidden capacity 
of good never unfolded. At considerable inter- 
vals you see these tokens of a deep and restless 
want in all the ante-evangelical literature and art. 
You hear their half-articulate wail or melancholy 
undertone in the Greek tragedies and epics, in the 
lyric poetry of the East, in the loftier meditations 
of Athenian and Latin philosoph}^ The same un- 
satisfied yearning for truth, for certainty, for con- 
solation, is carved into marble, built into pyra- 
mids, and framed into temples. So that, while 
we draw one and the same conclusion, we draw 
it from two apparently opposite classes of ancient 
testimonials — those that testify to constant error 
and degradation on the one hand, and those that 
witness to a frequent but blind reaching after the 
completeness in Christ, which makes so wonder- 
fully descriptive his title in prophecy, " the Desire 
of all nations," on the other. Both declare with 
voices unutterably and most pathetically sad, that 
humanity needed Christ, and was waiting for him 
when he came. 

Let the following positions, then, stand in order : 
I. In no one nation of antiquity, in no one non- 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 69 

Christian corner of the earth since, was there 
ever a steady and lasting advance in moral and 
intellectual life. There has been no permanent 
non-Christian civilization. Always there was re- 
cession after progress, decay after vitality, eclipse 
after brilliancy. 

2. No people was ever lifted out of barbarism, 
none was ever regenerated or vitalized, by its own 
force, or from within itself; but every people only 
by the coming in and coming down upon it of a 
quickening power from without and from above. 
So profound a reader of the past as Niebuhr says 
emphatically : '' Civilization is never indigenous ; it 
is an exotic plant wherever it is found." Herder 
says : '^ No man has the birth of his mind, any 
more than the birth of his body, through himself 
alone." Lord Bacon says it. The fable of Prome- 
theus and other myths confessed it on the spot 
where the natural fire burnt brightest. Then it 
follows that originally, if you carry back the 
search for your regenerating power from one coun- 
try to another, you must find it, at last, in an upper 
country, />., in Him Avho comes from above the 
world into it ; and " He that descended is the same 
also that ascended up far above all heavens, that 
he might fill all things." 

3. It is now the settled judgment of competent 
judges that in heathendom, with exceptions too 
insignificant to be taken into account, all nations, 
all tribes, have worshipped ; that man is a worship- 
ping creature, has an inborn sense of a superior 
agency or a stronger force than himself, generally 



70 LECTURE THIRD. 



a person or persons.* In our day travel and voy- 
age have virtually completed the exploration of the 
planet, and their verdict is that it is extremely 
doubtful if there is an absolutely non-religious com- 
munity, even among the Bushmen of South Africa. 
Yet worship never combined the three traits to- 
gether, of being equally suited to all classes, of 
elevating and purifying the moral life, and of satis- 
fying the worshipper as his intelligence increased, 
except in Christianity. 

4. The idea of a divine Fatherhood, central to 
Christianity, was absent from every non-Christian 
religion ; and yet the parental instinct, in its 
mighty and tender energy, is universal — natural 
religion thus missing what it wanted most. 

5. Recent psychological and experimental sci- 
ence has decided that the average man every- 
where has four instincts, which may be considered 
as the foundation of all natural religion : the 
instinct of somewhat or some one above himself ; 
the instinct of immortality, or continued existence ; 
the instinct of conscience, or of a law of right and 
wrong, as obligatory upon him ; and, as a conse- 
quence of that, the instinct of alarm or foreboding, 
as the effect of doing wrong. These are unwritten 



* " Obliged as I am, even by my education, to pass in review the 
races of men, I have sought for theism in the lowest and in the 
highest, but nowhere have I met with it, except in an individual, 
or at most in some school of men, more or less known, as we 
have seen in Europe in the last century, and as we see at the 
present day. Everywhere and always the masses of the people have 
escaped it." — M. Quatrefages, cited by the Archbishop of York in 
his " Limits of Philosophical Inquiry." 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 7 1 

prophecies. All the four stand in the front of the 
four Gospels. 

6. While the cleverest ancient thinkers included 
among their beliefs, and oftener among their con- 
jectures, that gf a life after death, there is not the 
slightest evidence that the idea of immortality had 
any practical influence whatever, either in check- 
ing vice and crime, or in encouraging spirituality, 
a circumstance which goes far to account for the 
place given to the resurrection in the first plant- 
ing of the Christian Church. It was the one doc- 
trine put with the divine name in the first preach- 
ing: *' Christ and the resurrection." 

7. Judging by authenticated descriptions of 
ancient society, and by the morals attributed in 
mythology to the gods, conscience was both van- 
quished and corrupted everywhere. Of the Chris- 
tian ethics, after all the opportunities of eighteen 
hundred years to outgrow it or to fault it, a stu- 
dent w^ho, if not a reluctant is certainly not an 
interested witness, says to his friends the ration- 
alists, '* The morality of the New Testament is sci- 
entific and perfect."* 

8. While the prevalence ot expiatory sacrifices 
in paganism was proof enough of a vaguely felt 
necessity for pardon, there was no conception, 
there was no dream, of a propitiation, which, like 
the cross, betokened the love of the Deity, or which 
revealed the first movement of reconcihation as 
stirring in the divine heart, or which drew the dis- 
ciple, by the sympathy of voluntary suffering, into 

* Mr. R. W. Emerson. 



72 LECTURE THIRD. 

a likeness to the spirit he worshipped. And 
therefore the theologian is right who lately said : 
" Christianity, and it only, as a scheme of thought, 
shows how man may look on all God's attributes 
at once, and be at peace" — his terrible justice and 
his tender mercy. 

9. Among the better mmds before the Christian 
era there was an enlarging idea of some principle 
of social order that should become universal and 
unify nations under a single rule; and hence the 
enormous comprehension of the Roman empire, 
just before the nativity at Bethlehem, stretching 
from the East Indies to the Atlantic, forcing a 
military peace, shutting the gates of Janus, hold- 
ing the populations of the earth to the imperial 
throne in one hand — a hand which, if not gentle, was 
firm, and watching them with an eye which, if not 
friendly, was all-seeing on the surface ; this, though 
a very metallic, coarse, and heartless symbol, was 
still a symbol singularly prophetic of that more 
glorious empire — -one, eternal, just and merciful 
— where the kingdoms of this world should become 
the kingdom of the Lord. 

10. Man abhors slavery. Slavery hurts what in 
him is most human. The welfare of humanity is 
bound up with its freedom. The new spirit acts for 
liberty, however, not on the political structure 
directly, but on the ruling men Avho, in the long- 
run, make the government despotic or free. It is 
De Tocqueville, the publicist, not any professed 
preacher, who says, '' Christianity is the compan- 
ion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its 
infancy, and the divine source of all its claims." 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 73 

It is Guizot, not a theolo2:ian but a civilian and 
statesman, who writes the work which proves the 
Christian faith to be the fountain of free institu- 
tions. This position is not w^eakened by the fact 
that the Church has generally arrayed no organized 
opposition against political serfdom or servitude. 
From the first, it received from the Saviour a dif- 
ferent commission ; and it went about its healing 
work by touching not the branches of the tree 
but its roots. It knew, and it has made the w^orld 
confess, that its principle of the brotherhood of all 
men, with one Father, where justice and love are 
the reigning forces ; where there is neither bond 
nor free, male nor female, having separate rights 
— " a great Christian commonwealth where all are 
one in Christ" — must in the end bring liberty with 
it to every class. The early Christian monks re- 
fused to be waited on by slaves. The Church was 
the slave's sanctuary, where the owner's hand, 
lifted to strike, was held off. The primitive mis- 
sionaries '' never lost an opportunity of redeeming 
slaves. Ecclesiastical legislation declared the 
slave to be a man, not a chattel ; laid it down as a 
rule that his life was his own, not to be taken 
without a trial, and it shut out from the commun- 
ion the master who murdered his serf."'^" That 
was a clarion of emancipation that rang far down 
into the soul of humanity when the Lord said, in 
the hearing of the frightened Pharisees and 
tyrants of Jerusalem, '' If the Son shall make you 
free, ye shall be free indeed" — and no man laid 
hands on him. 

'" Bishop Harold Brown. 



74 LECTURE THIRD. 

II. Whoever thinks imagines. Imagination, in 
its broader sense, is the creative faculty. Creation 
by man is art — the art of beauty or design. Does 
Christianity recognize this department also of 
man's mind ? 

Turn to the Master himself, taking with you 
the three great principles of artistic work. First, 
there is intense sympathy with nature. In 
three years of most anxious and suffering labor in 
the august purpose of re-creating the conscience 
and soul of the race, speaking only a few brief 
addresses that are known to the world, Christ 
nevertheless so blends his life with the scenery of 
his native land and sky, and so weaves the living 
and growing things of the earth into the expres- 
sion of his spirit, that thenceforth Palestine is in- 
separable from Jesus, and the Gospel and nature 
are set into eternal harmony. Men have agreed 
to call the language that does that '' poetry." 
Another essential artistic principle is the presenta- 
tion of an original ideal under images and materials 
that are common and familiar. Christ's original 
ideal is a character where such opposites as gen- 
tleness and power, self-subjection and personal 
authority, frankness and reserve, spotless purity 
and sympathy with the sinful, pity and indignation, 
sensibility and courage, are mingled without one 
stroke of discord ; and every image and color of 
which that majestic figure is composed is taken 
from things familiar in the houses and streets and 
farms of the people. 

Still another principle of the most perfect pro- 
ductions in art is unity in variet}^ You study the 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 75 

words of the Saviour, from the baptism at the Jor- 
dan to the mysterious predictions and farewells 
of the paschal night. The range of subjects, the 
diversity of illustration, the contrasts of tone and 
style, are as boundless as the life of the world that 
now is and of eternity. Yet no thinker ever thinks 
of Christ as having but a single aim in all he ever 
did or spoke. 

Can we wonder, then, that his religion from the 
first has satisfied that sense of beauty which never 
quite forsakes men anywhere, and which rises 
and is refined in them as their whole estate is ex- 
alted ? Can we wonder that this holy Faith, stern 
in morality and solemn in prospect as it is, should 
welcome the ministry of what is beautiful in shape 
or color or sound, if only it keeps its ministerial 
place, and glorifies without materializing the spirit- 
ual realities of that unseen Kingdom which is, after 
all, within and above ? From the moment Christ 
took our flesh and slept on his mother's arm at 
Bethlehem, to his last agony. Christian art has 
preached him to the nations. Can we recall one 
signal incident in all his sacrificial way to which 
it has not brought an interpretation for the under- 
standing or a persuasion for the heart? Some- 
times, to be sure, it has been a Rubens, sensualiz- 
ing the soul — as what instinct of God may not 
depravity degrade? But oftener it has been the 
Angelico, who, every day, when he renewed his 
work on his picture of the crucifixion, shed tears 
of faith and love. You might pull down, in a mis- 
erable iconoclasm, from the walls of Christian gal- 
leries and dwellings all these pictured sermons of 



76 LECTURE THIRD. 

your Saviour's redemption : to be sure you would 
not shake the cross, or take its saving- virtue from 
one drop of the precious blood, or blot a feature 
from the face of the Son of God ; but you would 
bury a perfume which our better humanity has 
scattered on the air of the world with the Gospel 
— a tribute to him who did not forbid his Evangel- 
ist to mention of the alabaster-box that it was 
costly, and that he accepted it. Sculpture has 
done less for the Faith ; and the Church might 
learn from that how this religion of the spirit 
always subordinates form to life ; for statuary is 
to painting what winter landscapes are to summer. 
The life is there, but it is frozen. *' The letter 
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." You might 
shear off all the spires and towers of Christian 
architecture from the scenery of the planet ; you 
would only dwarf the cedars of Lebanon into a 
field of stumps ; you would not kill the root. 
You might silence the anthems and oratorios of 
Christian music, sung by the genius of Germany, 
Italy, and England ; but the ear of Chi'istendom 
would listen still, through all the feasts and vigils 
to come, for some strains of its '' Creation," its 
" Messiah" — songs of Moses and Elijah, of David 
and Isaiah, and Patmos — to be sung once more. 
We cannot be wrong in saying that our religion 
is human in accepting the service of beauty in the 
arts. 

12. In the spiritual sphere, the element above 
nature, that something which all people feel and 
most people acknowledge as belonging to the un- 
seen, was for the first time made to harmonize 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DO UBT J J 

with nature, in Christ's ministry. There we find 
nature and the supernatural flowing together ; we 
pass, in reading the New Testament story, from 
the ordinary to the miraculous, and from the 
miraculous back to common life, following Jesus 
and his apostles, without a break or a jar. There 
is nothing like this in any mythology. Earth and 
heaven were never so brought together as when 
the Son of God, from heaven, stands among men. 
Nay, more ; in the same revelation, the space up- 
wards between man and God is filled up with super- 
human life. If we start at the bottom of all animated 
existence, its lowest grade, and move up from the 
monad towards man, natural science shows us 
the steps of an unbroken gradation. Rank by 
rank the living creatures rise, in one majestic 
order of creation, from the first cellular tissue that 
was built, to Newton, to Shakespeare, to Fenelon. 
And every order, by its own structure and organs^ 
to the scientific eye, predicts the one coming next 
above it. All along you trace signs of anticipation, 
of something greater, of a loftier kind of creature 
than the one you see. A voice out of the rocks, 
out of the sea, out of the slime of sedgy pools, and 
the shadows of forests, and the clefts of the wilder- 
ness, cries forever : " After me cometh one might- 
ier than I." Given the lowest, the highest must 
be. Given your monad, man must be. But is man 
your ^' highest"? Is that immense interval Avhich 
stretches between Newton and the Almighty 
One an unpeopled waste ? Does your steadily 
ascending scale stop at the mortal line, leaving 
all the upper spaces of the universe empty 



yS LECTURE THIRD. 

this side of God ? Does this look like the fulfil- 
ment of law ? Granted that man is the crown 
and summit of nature, yet there haunts his breast 
an unquenchable sense of a vast and living world 
above him, reaching all the way to the foot of the 
throne. Leibnitz, with his searching vision, saw it. 
"Nature," he says, ''never makes a leap." And 
what science, or man at his best intellectual 
estate concludes, the Gospel reveals. That spirit- 
ual world stands open, and its inhabitants — angels 
and archangels, cherubim and seraphim — are 
visible, moving, ministering, worshipping. From 
the first patriarch to the last apostle, Bible-men 
behold them. And he on whom they are seen 
ascending and descending is the Son of Man.^ 

II. Observe how this religion is comprehensive. 

The East and the West of antiquity were not 
more contrasted in their geography or their tem- 
perament than in their habit of religious thinking 
or their theory of man's relation to the other 
world. They started from opposite points, and 
the difference clung to them all the v/ay, in pro- 
cess and conclusion. To the oriental mind the 
conception of religion was that of the divine 
world coming down to the human. The move- 
ment begins at the upper end of the line. God 
or the gods must make a demonstration, having 
mankind for its objective point. There is first 

* "Each step is a revolution in one point of view ; but then 
the lower state prepared itself for the higher, prophesied, so to 
speak, of its coming, and the higher seated itself so easily on the 
throne prepared for it that we do not wonder to find it there." — 
" Design in Nature," by W. Thomson, D.D. 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OE DOUBT. 79 

conceived a supernatural sphere, occupied by 
deities or aeons, one emanating or derived from 
another, often in couples, in a descending series. 
This upper universe has a kind of completeness in 
itself. Whether Persian or Chinese or Indian or 
Egyptian, the system builds itself on ideas of a 
heavenly hierarchy or family, independent of hu- 
manity. Be man what he may, or where he may, 
the celestial orders have their own domain and 
their own genealogies. If man is lifted up out of 
his abjectness at all, it must be by a condescension 
which first stretches its arms downward from 
above. 

With Western thought, on the other hand, man 
was set to climb upward, with such help as he 
could get, towards the gods, perhaps into a god. 
Olympus takes its coloring and shaping from 
mortal preconceptions. A deity is a man or 
woman with every faculty and passion enlarged, 
except those which Christ shows to be most really 
godlike. The movement starts now at the bottom 
of the line. The East, i.e., in religion, sees this 
world touched and more or less irradiated by the 
sun-fire of the skies. The West sees humanity 
struggling and fighting its way heavenward, and 
when it gets there, taking a great deal that is of 
the earth, and very earthy, with it. The East 
humanizes its God ; the West deifies or apotheo- 
sizes man. 

Is it not very easy for us all, then, to see how 
the religion of Christ, and that alone, with its equal 
adapation to Orient and Occident alike, takes 
both these diverse tendencies together and makes 



8o LECTURE THIRD. 



one Faith for the world ? '' He who ascended is 
the same also that descended." "■ The Word is 
made flesh." '' I, if I be lifted up, will draw all 
men unto me." " Now are ye," sons of men, '' the 
sons of God." '' Hereafter ye shall see the angels 
of God ascending- and descending upon the Son 
of man." These are some of the marvellous decla- 
rations of that glorious unity in which the incar- 
nation of our Lord becomes the bond of our race. 
" That in the dispensation of the fulness of times 
he might gather together in one all things in 
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are 
on earth, even in him — far above every name 
that is named, not only in this world but also 
in that which is to come, and gave him to be 
head over all things to the church, which is his 
body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." 

in. Here, however, we meet the contradiction 
of unbelief. This is not the place to deal with 
the value of the skeptic's arguments, but only with 
his doubt or denial taken in itself as a phenome- 
non in fact. When Christ was alive among his 
countrymen, working his wonders, healing their 
diseases, there were those whom this divine spec- 
tacle of charity did not charm or convince. 
The Scripture tells us this, Avith sublime candor, 
never caring to make out a case by hiding an}^ 
reality. '' Some doubted." The line of doubters 
has lengthened, down from Celsus and Cerinthus 
to the protean skepticism conspicuous in the liter- 
ary countries of Europe, with its importations 
and imitations in America. What account is to 
be given of them, if it be true that man, by 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 8 I 

virtue of his humanity, wants Christ and his 
rehgion ? 

First, and most emphatically, among- all attacks 
on the Christian Faith, in any age, only in very 
rare and exceptional cases has the assault been 
upon Christ himself, upon his own character as 
a person, or upon that type of character which it 
was the supreme object of the Saviour to create 
in mankind. We have now in our hands the ma- 
terials for a complete history of skeptical thought 
from the beginning ; indeed, it has been compe- 
tently written, fifteen years ago, in one of the 
courses of lectures at Oxford, from which this 
lectureship takes its syllabus of subjects." Noth- 
ing is more remarkable in that history than that 
amidst the varied shapes of infidelity the assail- 
ants, by a vast majority, have directed their 
criticism against other points than the heart of 
the spiritual system in the person of our Lord.f 
You have to remember how manifold those other 
points are, in a system which involves elements 
so complicated as these : a body of writings made 
up of sixty-six distinct compositions by almost as 
many writers, all unlike each other, produced in 

*"A Critical History of Free Thought," by Adam Storey 
Farrar, M.A., Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. Cf. Lecky. 

f An apparent exception might be alleged to exist in the rib- 
aldry and blasphemy of the French atheists of the last century. 
But a more careful inquiry will show that with nearly the entire 
school that grew up about Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclo- 
pedic, in Paris, as well as at the court of Frederick the Great, 
the declared reasons of disbelief lay in the regions of philosophy, 
politics, and the passions, and remote from the real substance of 
the Religion of the New Testament. 



8*2 LECTURE THIRD, 

different countries, in different languages, at inter- 
vals of time extending over a period of nearly 
two thousand years, belonging to all departments 
of literature, full of dates and figures, and touch- 
ing nearly every topic of human concern and 
many nations of the time ; then, the histories and 
peculiarities of a large number of persons living 
in a remote age ; then, elaborate systems of law, 
opinion, and ritual ; then, a series of external acts, 
some of them miraculous, running through the 
whole period and surrounding the person of Christ 
himself ; then, the minor teachings or doctrines ; 
then, the circumstances that attended the planting 
of a great institution, the church, in many lands ; 
and, lastly, the subsequent historic incidents grow- 
ing out of this Faith. Must it not necessarily be that 
a Christianity including all this, however adapted 
its main and central figure might be to human 
needs, would provoke, everywhere and always, in 
countless details, that critical and skeptical faculty 
which is a part also of man's constitution, and is 
undoubtedly one of the instruments given him 
for distinguishing what is true from what is false ? 
Again, man in his organization is not simple but 
composite. And whatever his deeper nature in 
its more deliberate and rational exercise might 
demand, it is evident that in the realm of both his 
passions and his interests there must always be 
counter-currents of desire. So the love of mortal 
life is clearly a permanent and universal trait of 
mankind ; yet, in some moods, under certain illu- 
sions — for pleasure, for money, from sheer audacity 
— life is sacrificed. It is evident that the Gospel, 



CHI ST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT, 83 

precisely because it does fit man as to the high 
ends for which he was made, crosses and vexes 
him as to his inferior inclinations, and hence, on 
the moral side, there always is, and always must 
be, in sensuality, in avarice, in every selfish pro- 
pensity, a tremendous motive to reject Christi- 
anity itself, and to dispute its credentials. The 
religion claims obedience, and will accept no 
divided empire over the affections and the will. 
The real Avonder will be, when we measure the 
pressure of this conflict, not that unbelief has 
been persistent or prevalent or ingenious, but 
that it has been held within the bounds which 
have actually restrained it. On the intellectual 
side, for the very reason that the Gospel has 
conquered, there is to a certain style of mind 
a fascination in the bare idea of seeing through 
it or defying its power. The history of free 
thought proves that in this impatience of au- 
thority, this pride of an independent reason, 
this ambition of the autocracy of the brain, has 
been a principal origin of each of the heresies and 
denials — Gnostic, encyclopaedic, philosophic, sci- 
entific, and even mystic. The unbeliever meas- 
ures his private mental force against the common 
belief in the most imperious and unyielding de- 
mand ever proclaimed. The tempter says, "Ye 
shall be as gods ;" and what ungodly mind would 
not be a god if it could ? 

A third reply to the objection named is that the 
Religion of Christ has been again and again dis- 
carded on account of the foreign matter affixed by 
superstition and misconception to its original sub- 



84 LECTURE THIRD. 

stance. Nothing is sadder to the student of skepti- 
cism than the constant return of this discovery. 
Nearly every form of continental infidelity has 
mistaken a mediaeval and half-mythologized Chris- 
tianity for the pure and primitive faith of Jesus 
and St. Paul. Even among the scholarly skeptics 
now living there is more than one Avhose entire 
negation proceeds on assumptions that would be 
impossible if the skeptic had ever understood 
either the primitive theology or the New Testa- 
ment itself. It is the dismal swing of the pendu- 
lum over a frightfully wide arc — from error to 
blank atheism, from False Decretals to Wolfen- 
biittel Fragments, from Calvin to Rousseau, from 
the Vatican to nihilism, from Mariolatry and saint- 
worship to no worship at all. Before reckoning 
the weight of unbelief against the fitness of the 
Gospel for man, we must deduct the momentum 
of this extravagant recoil. 

Fourthly, however, the recoil always has its 
limits. The proportion of doubt and faith, wher- 
ever there is intellectual activity and a healthy 
freedom, does not shift in favor of doubt, unless 
in transient and returning waves. Judging by the 
patristic apologies, most of the modern difhculties, 
in kind, were started before the end of the fifth 
centur}^ or even the fourth. The French infidel- 
ity of a hundred years ago ; the denials in Ger- 
many of Semler and Eichhorn and Paulus and 
Strauss ; the English free-thinking of Bolingbroke 
and Herbert and CoUins and Hume, are all at 
this moment, as scholars know, largely spent 
forces. '' The incontrovertible fact is," a contem- 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 85 

porary student has observed, "that nearly every 
prominent German theological school is now 
under predominant evangelical influence. Twenty 
years ago the Tubingen school in criticism was 
formidable. Its hopeless decline has been written 
in more than one tongue." '* Strauss laughs at 
Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Renan at Baur, the hour 
glass at all." 

The matter of unbelief as springing from dis- 
coveries in physical science lies apart from this 
discussion, except as it may favor a certain skep- 
tical tendency respecting all opinions received 
from the past. I do not enter, by a single step, 
the province of purely physical investigation. 
But standing at the gate of it — the entry of that 
city of material nature — this Christian Avisdom 
calls to the men who go in and out, and tells them 
these four things, which some of them would seem 
willing to have unsaid and unremembered, but 
which no one of that searching company of stu- 
dents has yet been able to deny. First, the char- 
acter of Jesus Christ is a phenomenon in the 
realm of fact, which, just because it stands outside 
the province of your physical inquiry, cannot pos- 
sibly be tested by any of your instruments or 
chemicals, cannot be disproved by any possible 
physical demonstration, and cannot be accounted 
for by any theory so entirely scientific as that 
which the Christian records and Christian history 
supply. Secondly, in similar terms, we say of the 
spiritual world and its contents : Personally, you 
may refuse the evidence for it to yourselves ; but 
you never can establish a negative ; it is impossi- 



86 LECTURE THIRD. 

ble to test spiritual substance by material analysis ; 
find what you may to be true of the nerve-centres, 
bioplasm, the brain, or the geologic antecedents 
of our race, that can never exclude from the uni- 
verse a class of facts which, by their very nature, 
if they exist at all, are as far beyond the laws of 
matter as its forms. Thirdly, so far not an ap- 
proach has been made to the fixing of the origin 
of natural life elsewhere than in a personal God ; 
and as to motion, the only parent of change — and 
nature is change — inertia being a law of matter, 
matter could never move or stir itself, but must 
have had a mover, or else there is an effect with- 
out a cause,* and therefore both the creation and 

■^ See a forcible demonstration of this point by the Rev. Prof. 
W. D. Wilson, D.D., LL.D., etc., of Ithaca. He says: " Spen- 
cer's theory is faulty in another respect. The state of ' complete 
equilibrium or rest,' whether first, last, or midst, is one from 
which the matter of a universe could never emerge without some 
' outside agency,' which is not material at all. It must have been 
rather a spontaneous person. 

" In ' complete equilibrium or rest,' no atoms or particles can be 
acting upon one another — or if several of them are acting upon 
each other, their activity is so balanced that they are at rest. 
What shall start them into action ? Shall some outside substance 
bring them nearer together so that they can begin to cohere ? 
Shall something change their temperature so that they shall be- 
gin to unite chemically, resulting in change of gravity and so in 
motion ? But what is this outside agency ? Not matter, of 
course, for all the matter of the universe is supposed to be in this 
state of complete equilibrium or rest. Shall the atoms begin to 
act of themselves ? Then they violate the laws and conditions 
of inertia, spoken of above. Or if we look in the other direction 
— to the second stage of rest, we shall encounter the same diffi- 
culty. When in motioji they may be said to have a certain mo- 
mentum or vis viva, but with a state of rest this becomes noth- 
ing, and cannot of course, therefore, start them into motion or 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. Z"] 

the re-creation by the Father of Man and Christ 
are superior to science, and the creatorship is in- 
dependent of nature, on which it acts. Fourthly, 
inasmuch as there is not one department of sci- 
ence where inquiry goes on without the working 
of the human facuUy which we call faith," there- 
activity again. And if matter is eternal, it must have passed 
through these maxima and minima not once or twice only, but 
an infinite number of times. These maxima and minima are 
real ' dead points' from out of vsrhich materialism can find no 
means of producing life or motion. But here the materialist 
resorts to some one or another of his 'forces,' which as we have 
seen are as ^ dead' as matter itself at these ' points.' 

" Hence if matter or ' the universe ' is ' self-existent ' or eter- 
nal, it must be forever and always in one and the same condition, 
with no development or evolution, unless there is some ' Exter- 
nal Agency ' who may as well have been its Creator — to set in 
motion and keep it moving in the process of evolution. And 
that is about all that mere science can know of creation." 

* Since these lectures were delivered there has appeared in 
print an address presented at a recent meeting of the German 
Association of Physicians and Naturalists at Munich, by Prof. 
Rudolf Virchow, of Berlin, a name of the very highest scientific 
authority in Europe, equally eminent in anthropology and chem- 
istry, containing the following passage among others, clearly de- 
signed to check and qualify the tendency to rash conclusions 
among his unreligious associates : " In reality, even in science, 
there is a certain domain of faith, wherein the individual no 
longer undertakes to prove what is handed down to him as true, 
but accepts it as simple tradition ; and this is precisely the same 
thing which we see in the church. Conversely, I may observe — 
and my view is one that is not rejected by the church itself — that 
it is not belief alone which is taught in the church, but that even 
church doctrines have their objective and their subjective sides." 
In the same paper occur these ominously judicial sentences, in- 
tended for the benefit of the school of Darwin and Prof. Vogt : 
" Only ten years ago, when a skull was found, perhaps in peat 
or in lake dwellings, or in some old cave, men always fancied 
that they detected in it evidences of a savage and quite undevel- 



LECTURE THIRD. 



fore the same faculty cannot be discredited in re- 
lation to the unseen and the unknown, presented 
to it in the revelation and person of Christ. 

Already it is beginning to be allowed by candid 
minds on both sides of the dispute, that the pros- 
pect of a final antagonism between the two classes 
of facts, or between revelation and nature, is di- 
minishing. Christian theologians admit evolution. 
Evolutionists admit an intelligent or thinking ori- 
gin of life. As to the Bible, it is generally agreed 

oped state ; in short, they were ready to find the monkey type. 
There is now much less of this sort of thing. The old troglo- 
dytes, lake inhabitants, and peat people turn out to have been 
quite a respectable society. They have heads of such a size that 
many a person now living would feel happy to possess one like 
them. I must say that our fossil monkey-skull or man-ape 
skull, which really belonged to a human proprietor, has never 
been found. As a fact, we must positively acknowledge that 
there is always a sharp limit between man and the ape. We can- 
not teach, we cannot designate as a revelation of science^ the doctrine 
that ma7t descends fro7n the ape, or from any other animal." 

Quite as striking, perhaps, though of less scientific gravity, is a 
concession publicly made a short time ago to a prominent Ameri- 
can Association of Free Religionists, disciples of Mr. Theodore 
Parker, by a well-known speaker of such radical opinions as Mr. 
Wendell Phillips, a defiant doctrinaire: " I am proud to be your 
lecturer, but your doctrine will not work. Tested by historJ^ 
tested by philosophy, tested by human nature, you will find it 
will not work." 

Every fair-minded Protestant must accept with sincere satis- 
faction the strong declarations of the agreement of Religion and 
true Science, put forth in the late Pastoral of the present Pope 
while he was Archbishop of Perugia, so entirely in contrast with 
the doctrines of the Syllabus of his predecessor. Great names in 
knowledge, the common possession of the modern world, are 
there set forward as those of deeply religious men who " rejoiced 
to adore the Creator in his works;" and the triumphs of the 
Study of nature are held up as contributions to the glory of God- 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 89 

that science has no right to quarrel with it, be- 
cause it has no scientific purpose or pretension. 
It is only trivial and superficial contestants 
that can enlarge any more on the battles of 
Faith Avith science, because the old war was not 
waged by Faith herself, but by men who dreaded 
innovation, not more for religion than for every 
other conservative instinct and interest, and as 
often by metaphysicians and politicians as by the- 
ologians. Finally, against the disbelief of the 
scientists, set the immense activity of modern 
Christendom, not matched through all the eight- 
een centuries before, in literature, in education, 
in social charities, in missions. Since the outgoing 
of primitive powers in the apostolic and sub-apos- 
tolic age, there has been no such wave of gospel 
light, no such magnificent sweep of unselfish obe- 
dience to Christ's commission, on the two hemi- 
spheres, as in the last two generations. Set that 
movement over against the entire rationalistic 
demonstration, and compare the two by any test 
of vitahty that your physics or metaphysics will 
furnish.'" 



* In the United States, since the beginning of the Revolution- 
ary War, the increase of population has been a little over eleven- 
fold. The increase of churches has been thirty-sevenfold. The 
members of these churches were then as one to seventeen hun- 
dred o^ the people. Now they are as one to six hundred. It 
seems that six houses of Christian worship are finished some- 
where in these States each working day of the year, and that fifty 
millions of dollars are spent yearly on objects connected with 
them. There are thirty-two millions of Bibles printed annually, 
and they are all distributed. There are three hundred and ninety- 
eight colleges, and more than eight hundred scats of a high sccu- 



90 LECTURE THIRD. 

IV. We can take society intellectually at its 
worst or at its best. If we ask how Christianity 
has fared with men in the inferior classes, the an- 
swer is positive. Not in Galilee or by the Jor- 
dan only, but everywhere Christ's first welcome 
has been with the common people, because in 
them what is coimnon to man is least encumbered 
and acts with most spontaneous liberty. Pass, 
then, to the mountain ranges of humanity. Start- 
ing at the Ascension, the peaks that are high 
enough in antiquity to be seen across the ages 
still have on their foreheads the cross. You can 
count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand. 
Give time for thought and doubt to do their best. 
Give a thousand years ; that is certainly liberal. 
Part, then, your lines of mental grandeur, and let 
them run as they will. What names of creative 
genius will you place near the four that stand in 
supreme splendor ? Dante's face, sculptured in 
classic majesty, is illuminated by the Christian 
sun, and his august epics are of worlds that only 
faith can see. This world is less real to many liv- 
ing in it than heaven was to Milton, or than Mil- 
ton made it to England. Michael Angelo, w^hose 
genius found itself in possession of all arts rather 
than mastered them, who said, '' I will hang the 
Pantheon between earth and heaven," and more 
than fulfilled his promise, wrote in his old age to 
Vasari : 

lar education, nearly all of them founded by believing men. 
That does not look as if Christians were much afraid of science, 
or as if knowledge were the friend of skepticism and the foe of 
faith. 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE GF DOUBT, 9 1 

" Well-nigh the voyage now is overpast, 

And my frail bark, through troubled seas and rude, 

Draws near that common haven where, at last, 
Of every action, be it evil or good, 

Must due account be rendered. Well I know 
How vain will then appear the favored art. 
Sole idol long and monarch of my heart ; 

For all is vain that man desires below. 

And now remorseful thoughts my soul alarm, 

That which must come, and that beyond the grave ; 
Picture and sculpture lose their feeble charm. 

And to that Help Divine I turn for aid 

Who from the Cross extends his arms to save." 

Shakespeare knew the Bible better than he knew 
courts, or Athens, or anatomy ; and in his last tes- 
tament, I reminded you, he bequeathed his soul 
for pardon to the Redeemer. Where was the 
early eloquence of modern France if not in 
her pulpits ? Where is the debt of all late phi- 
losophy if not to Continental and Scotch and 
English Christians ? The foremost philosophical 
historian of Germany, after disbelieving-, commits 
his son to be trained in the Christian creed. 
There is a modern German, who, as well as any, 
unites the finest culture to original insight — Jean 
Paul Richter. He deliberately writes : *' He who 
was the holiest among the mighty, and the might- 
iest among the holy, has, with his pierced hand, 
lifted heathenism off its hinges, and turned the 
dolorous and accursed centuries into new chan- 
nels, and now governs the ages." There is an 
American, who, as well as any, unites the keenest 
logical subtilty with the grandest power of gen- 
eralization in jurisprudence and in statesmanship. 
He said, in a most lucid hour, " The Gospel of 



92 LECTURE THIRD. 



Jesus Christ must be a divine reality. This belief 
enters into the very depth of my conscience." 
And on his sepulchre by the sea, made ready in 
his lifetime, he caused these words to be cut : 
^' Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" — a 
creed, and a prayer. There is a man who, be- 
sides having- the brain of a mathematician and 
the courage of a soldier, and a most penetrating 
insight into other men, has proved a greater con- 
queror than Alexander or C^sar. He is at St. 
Helena. Three biographers and all scholars 
agree that he said this : " Can you tell me who 
Jesus Christ was ? I think I understand some- 
thing of human nature ; and I am a man. Jesus 
Christ was more than a man. Across a chasm of 
eighteen hundred years Jesus Christ makes a de- 
mand which is of all others difficult to satisfy. 
He asks for the human heart ; he will have it en- 
tirely to himself. He demands it unconditionally, 
and forthwith his demand is granted. jNIillions 
of men to-day would die for him. This proves to 
me convincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ." 

Do we need to look any farther along the 
heights of history for signs that the Religion of 
the Son of Man is suited to mankind ? 

The longer you look the more every mist of 
doubt melts away ; the more sharpl}^ and firmly 
the outline of the great historic realities which 
gave Christianity its life stands out. 

Most effectual of all helps to this blessing of 
trust is the cultivation of a personal intercourse 
with him, whose personal power and grace 
are the glory of all time. It is, I believe, the 



CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT, 93 

experience of most men who have dealt with 
the difficulties of doubters, that the greater 
number of those minds that are brought home 
to faith are drawn by some new feeling of what 
Christ is, and what his love is worth, rather 
than by any argument. The hours come — they 
are sure to come — they come to the strongest 
heads and the gayest spirits, when, by some hard 
blow or secret voice, by the sorrow of bereave- 
ment and broken-heartedness, or the more myste- 
rious and sometimes heavier sorrow of mere 
satiety of self and weariness of the world, we 
know, at last, that there is no other place for the 
sick head and the faint heart and the sinful con- 
science but a place close to the Son of God. 
Some one from the house may be gone out for- 
ever. A hollow heart that we trusted may be 
uncovered. The mere dull wearing out of dis- 
appointed hopes may turn the eyes to the hills 
from whence cometh our help. We lie awake 
alone, conscious of eternity, and hear ** time 
flowing through the middle of the night." Some 
strange pain in your body prophesies the end 
and the Judgment. The past is dead ; the future 
is dark. You know your sin. Men and women, 
at their best, cannot forgive this sin ; cannot satis- 
fy this thirst for a true life — this hunger after God. 
Then there will come to you a new reason for 
faith, better than all the evidences of learning 
or logic together. You need your Saviour Christ, 
and looking unto him you know, believing, that 
you are saved. 



LECTURE IV. 



of action : its ^pptnX to titc 
gttmati ^milX. 



♦'X ant rcatJS to $teac!) t!)c ©osjjel to jou tf)at are at 

3^0me also.** — Rom. i : 15. 

" STije l^infltiom of CSoU is not in toor*) tut in pobjcr/'— 

I Cor. 4 : 20, 



^cixou5 Ibfij iX ^jeaw^itl^ %uxo. 

In the great historic transition from Greek to 
Roman society we encounter a fresh demonstra- 
tion that Christ embodies the essentials of human- 
ity, and that his religion is not limited by national 
lines. Between the two societies themselves the 
contrast is immense. Whatever Greece had done 
at the Christian era to colonize its language, its 
arts, or its vices in Italy, Rome was Rome imperial 
still. A skeptic of the reign of Nero might have 
said, Granted that your Galilean has prospered 
east of the Adriatic by some oriental tinge in his 
blood, these western lands and armies, with robust 
practical energies, will own no such crucified 
Master! Yet silently, but swiftly, as we shall 
see, the faith of the crucified Master entered 
in, without sword or policy, and, by such arms 
as never tried the gates before or since, con- 
quered Rome. The Gospel suits every social 
type it encounters, because it is '^ not in word 
but in power." It is no more Semitic than Aryan, 
no more Syrian than Tuscan, no more Arabian 
than Gothic. You find a Christian on the Tiber, 
among Norsemen, in Ceylon, in Carthage, and you 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



know him b}^ his Master. The man is no more and 
no less a Christian, however temperament may 
modify his religious emotions, for a torrid or a 
frozen climate, for sand or forest, for his color, 
for his tongue. One ethnic family takes on the 
stamp almost as freely as another, and the Christ 
formed within is independent of all the tribal 
moulds or traditions. It is so on every continent 
to-day. From the river of Christ's baptism to the 
ends of the earth you know the Christian as a 
Christian. What does it mean, but that Christ 
has and is, in himself, what is characteristic of 
man, and can be separated by no bounds from any 
race? The government may be imperial, patri- 
archal, feudal, military, democratic ; that avails 
nothing to unfit its subjects for the universal citi- 
zenship. Each polity is left free to develop it- 
self by other laws, except as they are all modified 
in their moral complexion, and tempered in their 
spirit, by the celestial law of charity. Christ is 
larger and deeper than any or all of them. So of 
the several arts of beauty. We recognize styles 
of painting, music, sculpture, architecture, and 
schools of letters. Christianity does not interfere 
with them, and is not excluded by them. It deals 
with character. It is behind the colors, the mar- 
ble, the sounds, the shapes, a more sublime essence, 
gradually purifying and elevating their genius, 
but too catholic to be provincialized, or national- 
ized, or suborned to any aesthetic domination. It 
is human, and includes all that is human, because 
it is also divine. This would all be otherwise if 
this religion, instead of being dj-namical, were 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 



99 



merely literary or artistic ; if it were in word and 
not in power, an opinion or a ritual only and not 
a spirit and a life.'" 

Moving- Avestward from Judea with St. Paul, 
the Gospel entered Europe through two great 
national doorways, the Athenian and the Roman 
mind. In each of these two intellectual moulds 
the original truth of Christ, still undivided and 
identical, took a distinct working- form ; and it 
was a distinction which has been preserved ever 
since, in the differing characteristics of the eastern 
and western branches of the church. By this 
'' diversity of operation" it seems to have been 
the plan of God that the common faith, springing 
from Jerusalem at the Christian Pentecost, as the 

* It can scarcely be necessary to show here in particulars that 
both directly and indirectly, by precept and example, Christianity 
harmonizes with all the better natural impulses, like courtesy, 
hospitality, the joyous use of the faculties in common lines of 
action, ceremonial homage, affections of kindred, marital devo- 
tion, special friendship, patriotism. In regard to some of these, 
it indisputably provides such beneficent regulation as insures 
the largest and most lasting welfare of the natural capacity or 
organ of enjoyment. That all efforts of its enemies to convict 
the Gospel of asceticism have failed, no more needs to be now 
asserted than that time has turned the impious wit of Voltaire 
and the French court of the last century into a ghastly absurd- 
ity. Rousseau's ingenious idea that Christian faith extinguishes 
the love of country and annihilates political responsibility, by 
transferring man's interest from this world to another, has been 
refuted over and over again, while it never needed to be re- 
futed at all. Mr. Herbert Spencer's recent papers on "Cere- 
monial Government," whatver else they prove or are intended 
to prove, establish an ample foundation in human nature for as 
much of the ritual element as was ever contended for in the 
Primitive or Protestant Church. 



lOO LECTURE FOURTH. 

law had reached out from the same centre before, 
should control the governing nations of the earth. 
Of the Latin race the predominant attribute was 
the will. The two capacious hands with which 
Rome seized the world were colonies and armies. 
And as the will is the executive faculty in man, 
so the Latin or Western Christianity became re- 
markable for its practical drill, moving every- 
where with the precision of a military array — ■ 
orderly, obedient — its aggressions kept well in 
hand, but ever pushing its way to occupy and sub- 
sidize, if it could, in an outward rule, the coun- 
tries of the globe.* Accordingly, the most con- 

* The contrast is carried into other but kindred regions in a 
passage in Freeman's "Principles of Divine Service," vol. i., 

p. 273. 

" The east is more uniform and unchanging ; the west more 
multiform and variable. While the west brings countless 
changes, according to the season, on the same essential idea, the 
east prolongs it in cne unvaried and majestic roll from the 
beginning to the end of the year. The east, again, is more soft, 
the west more intellectual. The east loves rather to meditate 
on God as he is, and on the facts of Christian doctrine as they 
stand in the creed ; the west contemplates more practically the 
relations of man to God. The east has had its Athanasius and 
its Andrew of Crete ; the west its Augustine and Leo. Hence 
psalms and hymns in more profuse abundance characterize the 
eastern ; larger use and more elaborate adaptations of scripture 
the western offices. The east, by making the Psalms all less 
meditative, seems to declare her mind that praise is the only 
way to knowledge ; the west, by her continued Psalm and lec- 
tion system, that knowledge is the proper fuel of praise. While 
the east, again, soars to God in exclamations of angelic self-forget- 
fulness, the west comprehends all the spiritual needs of man 
in collects of matchless profundity ; reminding us of the alleged 
distinction between the seraphim, who love most, and the cheru- 
bim, who know most. Thus the east praises, the west pleads. 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. lOI 

spicuous aspect that the new rehgion put on 
among the churches of the west was that of an in- 
stitution for the regulation of human life and the 
shaping of society. Of the Greek people, the 
prominent traits were mental liberty and versa- 
tility. Art, poetry, eloquence being the instinc- 
tive manifestations of their genius, every thing 
ran to expression. Even their cities were not so 
much strongholds of dominion as *' theatres of 
scenic pomp and beauty," their navigation not 
merely '' expeditions of war" but '^ ventures of 
curiosity" or a commerce whose gains made the 
seaports sesthetically brilliant and gay. In their 
very games or trials of physical strength the lite- 
rary feature was about as salient as the muscular, 
and Olympia was almost as much the "■ garden of 
great intellects" as the arena of bodily gymnastics. 
Hence when the missionary apostle, planting the 
cross along the shores, crossed over from Asia 
Minor to Athens or Philippi, he struck upon com- 
munities whose culture and originality chose the 
channel of speech rather than of organized action 
— a people gifted, famous, and sometimes victori- 
ous, with their tongues. They came to one 
another in the wisdom of ** words." 

But the word or name is never the thing itself; 
the sign is not the matter signified ; the carrier is 

The one has fixed her eye more intently on the glorious throne 
of Christ, the other on his cross. Finally, the east has been 
more inquisitive and inventive in the departments both of 
knowledge and praise ; the west, more constructive, has wrought 
up, out of scattered eastern materials, her exhaustive Athanasian 
Creed and her matchless Te Dcum." 



I02 LECTURE FOURTH. 

not the freight conveyed. It is only when the mind 
of a people has become thin and light, its habit 
artificial, its education ''weak and literary," 
that the two are confounded, and you have a Delia 
Cruscan period in letters, declamation at the 
forum, or cant in religion. 

I have submitted hitherto that Christianity is 
suited to man everywhere, because man is a crea- 
ture of affections, and yet finds no perfect love 
answering his own, except in the person of Christ ; 
because he is also a creature of worship, and finds 
no worship that raises, or purifies, or comforts 
him except in Him whom St. Paul at Athens 
" declared " to the Athenians ; because he is 
a creature of thought, or intellectual curiosity 
and invention, and finds at last no rational expla- 
nation of the past history of his race, and no key 
to the problems of his destiny, except in that 
Lord of the intellect who needed not that any 
should testify of men, because he knew w4iat is in 
them. I submit now that Christianity is suited 
to man because man is a creature of will, i.e., of 
action, and yet finds no perfect law to act by 
except in the will of God meeting and ordering 
his own, a law proceeding from the king of that 
kingdom which is not of this Avorld. 

Without this king the world had its best legal 
training in the Roman jurisprudence. It grew 
up finally to the Pandects of Justinian, from the 
rudimentary twelve tables, dating back nearly 
five hundred years before the Christian era ; yet 
Justinian himself was a tyrant, an extortioner and 
a libertine, and his Avife a harlot. The system has 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. I03 

had its effect, both as precedent and pattern, on 
all the subsequent legislation and judiciaries ; on 
the laws of the Ostrogoths and Lombardy, the 
Bulgarians, the Franks of Gaul, the law schools of 
Italy in the middle ages, the minds of the Magna 
Charta barons of England, and the courts of near- 
ly every modern European state. The Prcctorian 
Edicts had expanded it. The law of nature, y//^ 
naturale^ had deepened and exalted it. Cicero, 
in his treatise De Legibiis, rises to a certain lofty 
conception of a universal republic under a single 
rule or code. '' This universe," he says, '' forms 
one immeasurable commonwealth and city. And 
as in earthly states certain particular laws gov- 
ern the particular relationships of kindred tribes, 
so in the nature of things does a universal law, 
far more magnificent and resplendent, regulate the 
affairs of that universal city where gods and men 
compose one vast association." (L. i., 7.) Mani- 
festly not only in the better intelligence of juris- 
consults and emperors, but in the people, there 
was a reaching after equity and a groping aspira- 
tion for justice between nations, as between man 
and man. 

Place with this grand action of the will by law, 
in the western empire, its superb system of inter- 
communication.'^" Out from the imperial city ran 
five vast and costly national roads, with solid 
basaltic pavements, branching to all the quarters 
of the globe, ramifying into a network of graded 

* Both these topics are more fully treated by Prof. Fisher, in 
his " Beginnings of Christianity," with references to various 
authorities. 



I04 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



and secure highways that stretched wherever an 
army would march or a caravan creep. They 
were in '' straight Hnes, crossing mountains and 
bridging rivers, binding together the most dis- 
tant cities, and connecting them all with the capi- 
tal." '' A journey might have been made on Ro- 
man highways, with only brief trips by sea, from 
Alexandria to Carthage, thence through Spain 
and France northward to the Scottish border, 
back through Ley den and Milan, eastward by land 
to Constantinople and Antioch, and thence home 
to Alexandria," a total distance of seven thousand 
miles. Along all these paths the traveller could 
measure his distances by milestones. '' Maps of 
the route, with information of stopping-places for 
the night, facilitated the travel." Augustus estab- 
lished a system of postal conveyances, used by offi- 
cers, couriers, and other agents of the government. 
Thus the intermixture of peoples was far beyond 
the common modern notion of it. "■ Greek schol- 
ars," says a German student, ''kept school in 
Spain ; the women of a Roman colony in Switzer- 
land employed a goldsmith from Asia Minor ; in 
the cities of Gaul were Eastern painters and 
sculptors ; Galileans and Germans serv^ed as body- 
guards of a Jewish king at Jerusalem. Jews 
were settled in all the provinces." Bands of mer- 
chants poured along all these avenues, plying an 
inland traffic. Commerce comes with peace, and 
the empire was peace. It was a peace Avon first 
by the sword and preserved by law. Along 
those roads moved the police of invincible armies, 
and the praetorian eagles. It was one mighty 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 105 

reign of law. Into such a world Christ was born 
at Bethlehem, a Prince and a Saviour. 

But if we ascend into the region of morals, what 
has law done there? With the Stoic, everybody 
knows, self-murder is no crime. Zeno, and that 
very Cleanthes whom St. Paul quotes at Athens, 
took their own life, as did Cato. No room is 
made among the sterner virtues for charity, 
which with Jesus is the fulfilling of all law, the 
root of morality, and the crown of character. 
Lucretius, the poetical interpreter of Epicurus — 
brought back lately by one of our ambitious natur- 
alists to instruct nineteenth-century Christians, 
leaving us to marvel 

"That star-e)'ed science should have wandered there, 
To waft us back this message of despair" — 

bids his countrymen forget to ask when a man 
dies whether he shall live again. And yet in all 
these breasts, if we study them deeply, there is a 
yearning for a lawgiver like the Son of Man. In 
their voices there is an undertone of sadness, a 
wail of despair, a cry for Christ. I believe that if 
Aurelius and Plutarch and Cato had seen him, 
they would have followed him. They dreamed 
of another republic, under a new and diviner com- 
mandment. Rome, such as she was, was an image 
of the common country of the human race. Plu- 
tarch says man may find his country everywhere. 
Christ says every man is my neighbor, my 
brother. 

Justice is not a thing worked out on the surface 
of the lands, written in codes, or comprehended 
in a standing army of 340,000 men. Was humanity 



I06 LECTURE FOURTH. 

safe? Did man rest satisfied and upright and 
pure, under the shadow of the throne or the shield 
of the magistrate ? Look again. Family life, so- 
cial life, the moral life of the individual, were 
rotten with vice and black with crime. The sen- 
suality of all the dissolute blood under the sun 
trickled into the population of the Seven Hills, 
reckoned at a million. The iniquities are too ter- 
rible to be named, unless we quote the hints of 
St. Paul's first chapter to Roman Christians. 
Two hundred years before Christ religious cere- 
monies and orgies, imported to Italy, had so 
much murder and debauchery in them that even 
the consuls were obliged to interfere, three thou- 
sand fanatical poisoners being executed in a year. 
So much for Roman law as the regulator of Ro- 
man life. 

Cicero divorced two wives, and marital infi- 
delity was onl}^ screened by marriage. Seneca 
mentions women, and calls them illustrious, who 
reckon time not by the common calendar, but by 
the number of their living husbands in succession. 
To kill infants, if they are troublesome, was law- 
ful. Roman women hired slave-whippers by the 
year to scourge their servants. The spectacles 
and games were public schools of indecency. The 
pantomime was obscene. In the arena, in Trajan's 
time, eleven thousand wild animals were slain in 
four months. Children of luxur}^, boys and girls, 
laughed at the torture of human captives, writh- 
ing in the agonies of death on the sand, torn by 
the teeth of lions. 

You take your place on one of those Roman 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. lOJ 



roads, it may be almost anywhere, in the days of 
Trajan or the Antonines — from the opening of the 
second century till near its close. St. John, the 
last of the band of twelve who stood around the 
Original Person to receive his mind and execute 
his orders and plant his church, will have gone to 
his rest, his visions closed. We will imagine that 
any written trace of any Christian record before 
that, any book, biography of Christ, memoir of an 
apostle, or fragment of any Father's apology is no- 
where to be found ; they may either have never 
existed or been burnt up around the stakes of 
some of the earlier martyr-fires, or buried in 
caves. We shall be able to find out from other 
sources in what cities and countries the Gospel 
has secured a foothold. They extend all the way, 
at intervals at least, from the East Indies, over a 
broad belt branching both sides of the Mediter- 
ranean to the Pillars of Hercules, and round to 
Great Britain. Christians are beyond the Euphra- 
tes — in Parthia, in Arabia. They are strong in 
northern Africa. The energy and valor of the en- 
terprising Scandinavians, Saxons, and brave Celts 
have acknowledged Christ as the mightier Master, 
his love as the highest law, and his cross as the 
supreme throne, in the forests of Europe, from the 
mouth of the Danube to the Orkneys. Even 
Gibbon estimates that of the entire population of 
the Roman empire at the Edict of Milan by 
Constantine, in A.D. 313, when toleration closed 
the ten persecutions, about a twentieth part was 
Christian. The proportion may have been less, but 
at the period we arc supposing, say the middle of 



I08 LECTURE FOURTH, 

the second century, if, as Gibbon reckons, there 
were one hundred and twenty millions of people, 
the Christians may have been four, or perhaps six 
millions. Tertullian, of Carthage, who before his 
conversion was a lawyer, the son of a Roman 
centurion, and who was in his prime in A.D. 200, 
wrote defiantly and without fear of contradiction 
to the imperial authorities, *' We outnumber your 
armies : there are more Christians in a single 
province than in your legions. We are but of 
yesterday, and we have entered every thing that 
is yours — cities, castles, council-halls, free towns, 
the very camps ; we have even the senate and the 
forum." 

Christianity went everywhere, because it was 
alive ; in caravans, in solitary pilgrims, staff and 
scrip in hand, journeying, sailing, climbing, swim- 
ming, to the ends of the known Avorld. Notwith- 
standing all it had against it, though it crossed 
all selfish passions and rebuked with unflinching 
severity all popular extravagances and sins ; 
though it struck kings in the face and made the 
rich purge out their luxuries and change their 
lives, yet in two generations after the death of its 
founders it had risen to a recognized rank among 
the statesmen, soldiers, authors, orators, and men 
of learning of the day. Was not ''the kingdom" 
with '' power ".^* 

* I have been unable to consult the Rev, G, Matheson's 
" Growth of the Spirit of Christianity from the First Century to 
the Dawn of the Lutheran Era ;" but from an epitome of its con- 
tents in the Saturday Review (March 30), appearing as the proof- 
sheets of these pages pass out of my hands, it will appear that, 



CHRIST GUIDIXG .VAX'S ACTIO XS. I Op 

America is the youngest child of the western 
civilization. The caravan halts on the Pacific 
shore. The *' star of empire" takes its way west- 
ward no further. Will it shine forever here on 
the same faith, alive and in action, and eternally 
young, that the star of the magi stood over, born 
with the young child at Bethlehem ? That prob- 
lem besets all minds that think at all, and gets 
an utterance of some sort, if not an answer, on al- 
most every tongue. 

Shall he who is the head of our race, Jesus 
Christ, continue to be acknowledged as its head by 
these enterprising western men ? Shall the revela- 
tion which has guided humanity thus far from the 
outset, in the great steps of a divine order, and 
which claims to have completed itself beyond the 
possibility of amendment in the recorded story of 
the Son of God, guide man still, under its con- 
clusive authority, as the law of his action and the 
power of his life ? Shall the nations that lead the 
world, shall this Anglo-Saxon and American race, 
in particular, be permanently Christian ? 

You have already the answer of our general 
proposition. Christ is man's eternal master, be- 
cause man always continues man ; and without 
Christ he never understands, interprets, com- 
pletes, satisfies, or comforts himself." But we 

while some of the colorings and conclusions of the author must 
be open to objection, his historical researches afford direct and 
weighty support to the statements in the text above, and to sev- 
eral other points taken in these Lectures. 

* It is no part of the object of this reasoning to enter the pro- 
vince of Natural Religion, and to offer this preadaptation as a 
proof of the existence of a personal God. At the same time. 



no LECTURE FOURTH. 

must see Christianity at ivork, if we would know all 
its fitness for mankind. Its strength against every 
kind of disbeliefs whether atheism, new religion, 
free religion, or against speculative or scientific or 
literary skepticism, lies largely in its being a sys- 
tem of action and a power of character. Much has 
undoubtedly been lost to the progress of the 
Christian faith, especially in later times, by mak- 
ing it too much a matter of opinion or feeling. 
Opinions are individual : they are therefore things 
of difference and debate : they are invested with 
changeableness and uncertainty. So with the feel- 
ings or emotions, which are the most variable part 
of us. In the religion of Christ both these in- 
gredients have place, because that religion belongs 
to our whole life, touching it at every point, hal- 
lowing every part ; but as surely as you make 
piety either emotional or speculative out of pro- 
portion, you enfeeble it ; you lay it open to the 
dissecting-knife, if not to the broadsword, of the 

here as much as in the region of matter, or the phenomena of 
instinct, the argument from design or contrivance, which, in 
spite of the objections of the anti-teleologists, has lately been 
so ably extended downward by Prof. Cooke and others, from 
organic to inorganic substances, seems to admit of a legitimate 
application. Design exists where such adaptation is found as 
implies prearrangement, an intelligent perception of the quali- 
ties of the objects mutually fitted together, a distinct precon- 
ception of the end to be obtained by the adaptation, and a 
rational use of the means necessary to reach that end. All these 
marks appear in the adjustment between the constitution of man 
and the Christian religion. Whether the human mind is able to 
conceive of such an intelligence as these conditions imply, as 
being otherwise than personal, is a question for consideration, 
but not belonging in this place. 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. Ill 

unbeliever. The modern church has opened the 
gate to many of the doubts which have puzzled 
it, because, keeping the '' word" of the faith, she 
has let go its ^* power." It can be said, I sup- 
pose, without dispute, that as the Latin hierarchy 
damaged Christianity by excess of outside appa- 
ratus and coercion, the tendency of Protestanism 
has been to etherealize and rarefy it, to lose 
sight of its solid base and its concrete events, its 
transactions, ordinances, monuments, verities, in 
a continual taking to pieces and analysis of its 
organs and rationalizing of its heavenly mysteries. 
The New Testament deals to a wonderful ex- 
tent Avith actual things in the person and per- 
sonal history of our Lord. Follow the apostolic 
preaching ; the substance of it was the Cross and 
the Resurrection — two facts. Look at the apos- 
tolic practice ; you see baptizing, missionary jour- 
neys, a diaconate with alms and charities for the 
poor, a sacramental communion, layings on of 
hands, palpable gifts of the Spirit. Faith was 
the necessary inward movement which impelled 
the whole man to reach out and take hold : — but 
what he takes hold of is a living and visible Jesus, 
a Saviour, Avith the acts of his mediatorial career. 
Beneath the things done, to be sure, were all the 
while things unseen; but the seen things and 
the doing of the things made the matter definite 
and real. Had the primitive church been more 
absorbed than it was in constructing speculative 
systems, separating doctrine from historic inci- 
dent, missionary sacrifice, means of grace, real 
life and the living Christ, it Avould have been 



112 LECTURE FOURTH. 



more like much of the modern type of piety, — 
morbidly introspective, anxious, dubious ; audit 
would have been liable to all sorts of hurts from 
a robust heathenism. When it became needful 
to make a creed, lo ! it was on hand ; it had already 
made itself ; for it was simply a putting together 
of the few chief realities contained in or cluster- 
ing around the Son of Man, the creed which clings 
to man, repeated here to-night. No wonder the 
church repeats it, for it has become the flag of 
her practical triumph as well as the norm of her 
belief. From the incarnation of Jesus proceeds 
historically and logically the whole visible and 
invisible system, one spirit and one body, one 
faith and one baptism. If our contemporary 
Christianity is in danger of being wordy, disput- 
able, mutable, and divided against itself, w^e had 
better turn so much the oftener to the original 
pattern lying independent of the little "• systems" 
which "have their day and cease to be." The 
Holy Spirit *' works," and by an ever-working 
body. 

The tree Igdrasil, not a lifeless Parthenon or a 
carved Sphinx, is the better type of the living tem- 
ple. It is a growing thing ; one sap-stream ani- 
mates each smallest fibre, and it feeds the whole 
body with one spirit. 

Come to the apostle's conception : " The 
kingdom of God is not in word but in power." 
Notice the leading term, '' kingdom." Had the 
religion which was embodied in Christ's person 
and preached in his Gospel been intended to 
tarry in the world merelj^ as a sentiment or idea, 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. \ 13 

feeling or thought, it would certainly be unaccount- 
able that both he and his evangelists should so 
carefully and constantly use this term to describe 
it; because it is not possible to conceive of any 
such thing as a kingdom or commonwealth 
otherwise than as having certain characters 
quite beyond any mere individual forms of life. 
To any '' kingdom" there are plainly certain 
things essential — a head or king, laws, members 
or subjects, organization, ordinances, boundaries, 
and unity. If against this it is objected that, 
after all, Christ's kingdom is not literally in 
sight as a concrete thing, we reply it is in sight 
just as every other kingdom is, through its insti- 
tuted forms of operation and constant agencies 
of "■ power." As a matter of course, its moral 
foundations, its reasons, must lie in the minds of 
men, and not in a material structure ; and that 
is as true of the civil commonwealth as of 
the spiritual. But all these seven attributes 
none the less are actual, and they imply neces- 
sarily a corporate life. The simple recognition 
of them in a hearty and practical sense, is 
loyalty to the kingdom. When we find our Lord, 
therefore, and his apostles, in proclaiming the 
Gospel, constantly using this term, — when we see 
it reappearing from the first opening of the 
Saviour's lips in Galilee after his own baptism 
to Paul's preaching at Rome between two sol- 
diers before he suffered, — everywhere '' the Gos- 
pel of the kingdom," and not the Gospel of the 
private mind alone, the conclusion is unavoid- 
able. They had a meaning in it, the same mean- 



I 14 LECTURE FOURTH. 

ing that St. Paul had when he said that there is 
one body, of which the Spirit is the life. In 
this conclusion we should be obliged, I think, to 
rest, even if they did not go on to tell us as 
plainly as they do, though, not in the manner of 
human constitution-makers, what the laws and 
the ordmances and the offices and the unity are, 
as well as who are the members, and who is tlie 
everlasting head, and to give this kingdom its 
evangelic name, the Church of Christ. Were 
this conception, Roman but more than Roman 
because Catholic, to be lost out of the mind and 
heart of Christendom, it would carry with it the 
loss, in the last result, of Christendom itself ; for if 
it was the Gospel of the kingdom that Christ de- 
livered, then a Gospel without the kingdom 
could not be Christ's Gospel. 

There is a sharp contrast, " word" on one 
side, and ''power" on the other. It raises the 
question. Wherein does the real strength of our 
religion here and now consist ? Granted that the 
original constitution was perfect, because it was 
divine, holding stored up within it the living 
treasures of God's truth, something else is want- 
ing besides that provided economy to bring 
these spiritual resources out into their intended 
operation. That second factor is man's activity. 
Unless the two are brought together, the whole 
outward establishment — no matter whether it is a 
hierarchy under Gregorys and Hildebrands, or 
a co-ordinate with the state politic under Tudors 
and Stuarts, or a free church as in the primitive 
age or in the United States — as to the grand 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. II5 

purpose of its founding, is only a mass of inert 
mechanism. Till the latent energy sleeping 
in it is quickened by the personal arising of its 
personal members to their work, it is only like the 
frame-work of the first day of the natural crea- 
tion ; the Spirit broods upon the deep, but the 
universe sleeps. There is no life born by action. 
There is no demonstration of the Spirit, no '' power." 
Traces of the same law are seen in the king- 
doms of physical nature. Two agencies must act 
together to move the mass. A sower went out to 
sow his seed ; he goes out over all this continent 
every spring-time, with the seed-corn in his hand, 
how often forgetting the parable it preaches to 
him of his own better life ! In the dull-colored 
thing between his fingers there is, to be sure, a 
prophecy and 2i potentia of life to come ; but then, 
if you let it lie in dry air, or seal it up in wax, 
it will sleep on under the same insignificant and 
fruitless rind through a thousand Aprils. In each 
grain there is a force slumbering. But it is not 
force in life, not vital power, till husbandry gives 
the earth's moisture a chance to unclasp the 
crust, and then the blade, the stalk, and the full 
corn in the ear publish the latent beauty to the 
eye, and return a harvest. Nay more, botanists 
tell us that inside the husk itself two different 
agents wait, side by side — the germ where the 
life is, and the albumen prepared to feed it 
as soon as it is quickened. When the sunshine 
and showers rouse them, they put their soft 
hands together, and lift up the green plumule 
mto the light, and sway it there, a kind of 



I 1 6 LECTURE FO UR Til. 

banner in the air, for the triumph of life. What 
was sown in weakness is raised in " power." A 
finished piece of machinery stands on the track 
waiting, every bright bolt and strong lever and 
elastic spring of the engine perfect in its place ; 
and yet the whole of it is nothing but a splendid 
heap of misused iron and worthless skill, a block 
in the way, unless a touch of a human hand lets 
on the propelling energy, adding to the beauty of 
construction the power of action. In all the 
kingdoms, the principle is the same. The '' power" 
comes by bringing together in their appropriate 
conditions those vital forces where the Creator 
has generated these capacities of life, holding them 
ready for their work. 

To me nothing in this subject is more clear than 
that, for the greater confirmation of the faith of 
Christ in our age, we want not a more wordy, or 
symbolic, or controversial, or speculative Chris- 
tianity, but a more operative or working Chris- 
tianity, taking the kingdom given, and carrying 
its principles into society ; opening the windows 
to the Spirit, and then going out in the strength 
of light and air to let the Spirit work through us. 
Most of the ecclesiastical troubles would settle 
themselves speedily, it seems to me, if Christians 
were bent upon turning their Christianity into 
character. 

The model is ever before us. We take our 
stand by the side of Christ's first men, men who 
knew his mind the best, in the morning hour of 
the Gospel. I am confident of )'our agreement 
when I say that the most manifest mark stamped 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. I17 

on the church as the Lord made it, and the 
apostles worked it, is action. The whole body 
is astir, and by that we know that it is alive. Evi- 
dently the men are possessed with the belief that 
something is given to each one to do. As soon as 
a Pagan or a Jew is converted, he arises and is 
baptized, and that is action. Their worship is 
active worship, responsive, body and soul adoring 
in sympathy, and all the heartier because they 
come to it from labor, and are getting new strength 
from it to carry back to labor. The praise is joy- 
ous, and lifts them up. The prayer is penitential, 
and they kneel down. The alms go always with 
the prayers, a sign of sincerity, and the token of 
active charity to the brotherhood. Every minis- 
ter is a missionary. They travel, they lodge on 
the sand, they swim rivers, they climb mountains, 
they take ship, they seek especially cities and 
seaports, the nurseries of commercial and intellec- 
tual vigor ; they go into synagogues — for so confi- 
dent are they in their vital consciousness that 
even the dryness of a synagogue does not frighten 
them. As soon as there are poor, there is an 
order of Deacons to take care of them. Action, 
you see, is written on every thing. There is no 
dead fuel, not much mere ''nominal Christianity" 
yet — a religion known by its '' words," however 
fine the words may be. It is as if the lands grew 
light by torches flaming up in every Christian's 
hand. " Words" are spoken, no doubt, and winged 
words they are, EitEa Ttrepoevta, in a sense that 
Homer did not know. Chief among them, you 
hear 07te word, a Name, and in that Name on 



Il8 LECTURE FOURTH. 

every tongue is the hidden source of all the 
"power." But the most unfriendly critic could 
not look on this early church and say that tJiere 
the kingdom is in '' word," or mistake it for a mere 
week-day worldliness that goes sentimentally to 
hear Sunday preaching. 

Had the Gospel brought in nothing but new 
theories of religion, new orators, new philoso- 
phies — why the Avhole eastern world was surfeited 
with them already, and its hills were hollow 
with dreaming hermits' cells. Mankind wanted 
a faith, and a faith in action ; not more mystics, 
or more monks, or more sophists, or soothsayers, 
or incantations. Christ's living witnesses arose ; 
and wherever they came among these empty- 
hearted nations they were like magnets let down 
among loose particles of steel. They drew and 
grappled to them the hungry souls of men. Ac- 
tion was the whole church's rule, and the king- 
dom was with power. I infer, then, that the 
church of God, being alive, has its energy not 
only in its tongue but in the steady activity of its 
hands and feet, in all its organs and members : and 
that, where it is so alive, men press into it and it 
lives on. 

You say, those were the days of pentecostal 
wind and fire : and so they were. But the wind 
that blew in the upper chamber blows still, and 
the fire that was kindled spreads. Has one of the 
original principles or first features of the kingdom 
been altered by time? Not a single truth of its 
teaching, or article of its creed, or law of its 
operation, or condition of its success, or promise 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. II9 

of its victory, has undergone the shadow of a 
change. From vrhat the church was then, we 
know what it ought to be now. 

The Corinthians, Christians and all, were exces- 
sively fond of handsome speech. They made a 
great deal of their schools of rhetoric, and even 
imagined they could tell truth itself by its style. 
They v/ere essentially a wordy or literary peo- 
ple, a quality in which Greeks and Americans 
are not wholly unlike. Letter was put before 
spirit; word before power. Among preachers, 
Apollos doubtless had the largest following. St. 
Paul, however, always adroit in taking men as 
they are, seizes on this trait and turns it to great 
account for his energetic argument: ** Where is 
the disputer of this world" — sophist and logoma- 
chist ? Artificial words are the tools of the pre- 
tender. So he makes them stand for all sorts of 
substitutes for hearty work. Another community 
might be given to dry dogmatics, another to a 
frivolous ceremonialism, another to feverish and 
transient excitements ; — and we could easil}^ 
enough, if it were civil, call the names of relig- 
ious bodies where each of these mistakes has 
done its mischief, — Avhile others still, who would 
be in every household the most numerous of all, 
would slide, through carelessness and selfishness, 
into a perfunctory sort of piety, having the form 
of godliness without the power. But '' the king- 
dom" is an organization of life. 

All along we may try the doctrine by that cri- 
terion. At certain epochs there are luminous 
tracts, belts of unusual light. They always lie 



I20 LECTURE FOURTH. 

along the high-water marks of spiritual action. 
Because men prayed with unwonted simplicity, 
or fervor, which brought them up stronger to 
their feet, or because the laity joined their hands 
to the ministry, or because some great Avrcnch of 
providential revolution snapped the hardening 
crust and tore open the eternal fountains again, 
therefore the primitive streams broke out, and 
the old energy revived. Examine these splendid 
periods and you always find them signalized by 
three special signs. One is that in the faith and 
teaching of such seasons there is a specially 
marked sense of the presence and influence of the 
Holy Spirit. Secondly, there is a strong realiza- 
tion of the Person of Christ, with a devoted per- 
sonal loyalty and love to him in both priests and 
people. And thirdly, besides the ordinary offices 
of preaching and church-going, there is a general 
co-operation of church members in devotional, 
charitable, and missionary action. Laymen take 
church enterprise into the range of their busi- 
ness tact, experience, and profits. They strengthen 
every practical arm of the church's benefac- 
tions — hospitals, schools, orphan-houses, reforma- 
tories. They gather in and consecrate the floating 
philanthropic impulses of the people, so that sec- 
ular benevolence is not left the chief channel for 
men's instinctive generosity. I believe these 
three marks are never absent from the church's 
times of refreshing, her places of triumph, and 
her periods of '' power." The best spiritual hon- 
ors the middle-age Christianity earned were not 
earned at the Vatican or in the monasteries of 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 121 

Europe, but in the fever swamps of South Amer- 
ica, in China, Japan, the northern forests, and 
later along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, 
and in Houses of Mercy. Protestantism has 
had its purest life when it was freighting ships 
with the Gospel-store for Iceland, Labrador, 
India, Cape Town, and Burmah. The wonderful 
Inner Mission of Germany and the City Missions 
of this country are salt that saves a great mass of 
Mammonism from absolute rottenness. 

We can look higher than all this, and find a 
more conclusive proof. Follow up the Christian 
stream to its source. Even with our gracious 
Lord himself it was not chiefly what he said that 
redeemed our race. It was what he did. Mar- 
vellous as those heavenly discourses were that 
drew to him the listening multitudes, though he 
spoke as man never spoke, it was not the Sermon 
on the Mount, not the parables, not the precepts, 
which made him the world's Saviour. There is a 
higher attraction, and it acts on a deeper neces- 
sity. The closing eyes of the dying generations, 
age after age, the breaking hearts in all their 
mortal agonies, the penitent prodigals and har- 
lots, the mourners, whither do tJicy turn ? Not 
first, and not last, to the hills of Galilee or the 
streets of Samaria ; but to Gethsemane, to Cal- 
vary, to the opened sepulchre. These are the 
scenes of the Saviour's action. Wonderful is the 
teacher, but more wonderful and mightier in 
power is the atoning sufferer. Wonderful the 
prophet, but more wonderful the priest and king. 
It is '' the labor of his dying love," the mediatorial 



122 LECTURE FOURTH, 

workj that creates the kingdom, and saves the 
world, and fills the heart of man. 

So Christ's religion is a living creature — him- 
self its life. A gospel is not merely something 
spoken to man, but something wrought /^r utai and 
m them. There is to be not only an oration, but an 
operation — as a ''liturgy," in the original sense, is 
not an oral effusion but a '' service." The church 
holds in her hand the inspired Bible — her warrant, 
her charter, not her substitute, for she herself is the 
breathing bride of the bridegroom ; and his glory 
on the earth is her love and trust toward him, her 
chastity, her eyes of pity, her feet of mercy swift 
and beautiful upon the mountains, her hands of 
human help for human want, tender and strong. 
I see no eternity for the Faith if it is only 
sometJiing to be said, an " excellency of speech." I 
see only a feeble future for Christianity if we 
build churches to hold rostrums and platforms 
only, or ordain a ministry to do nothing else but 
discourse ; for so we turn the grand ofihce of 
preaching — which is grand with the grandeur of 
the Gospel in its sphere — into a human usur- 
pation. There are wants that this will never sat- 
isfy. Three great parts make up this religion — 
Christ, the Kingdom, Righteousness — a practical 
trinity of our dynamic Gospel. Unless that Cath- 
olic conception of it prevails, the world's sci- 
ence, suffering, toil, — thinking, groaning, weary, 
— will reach away from it, feeling sadly after some 
more solid salvation. All honor to a voice, crying 
in the wilderness, crying at the entr}^ of the city, 
crying anywhere, if it is Wisdom's voice! But 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. I 23 

a sinning soul's repentant faitii, its tears, its love, 
are for him alone who comes '^ travelling," — 
through the agonies, the toils, the tears, the temp- 
tations, the deeper deserts of our humanity, on to 
the cross where the sorrows are conquered, and 
up to the Father's right hand where he liveth 
to make intercession for men. 

Real in itself, in the intensest sense of that Avord, 
the character of Christ presents to every age, and 
to every age equally, the ideal of humanity. It is 
not the ideal of a period, or a country, or a class. 
Instead of passing beyond him, the whole progress 
of the race only grows up tow^ards him. INIankind 
as a whole have far more sympathy with that char- 
acter now than they had when it first appeared. 
Group together all the highest moral aspirations 
expressed m every literature, and they point, 
with sure consent, to a pattern which, line for 
line, is found in the life of Jesus ; there is not so 
much as a pretence anywhere, by friend or 
enemy, that they are satisfied in any other. 
The more men study that character, the better 
they agree that it is higher than the highest on 
the earth, and so much higher that no merely na- 
tural hypothesis explains it. Take, for instance, 
Mr. Lecky, writing eloquently the history of Eu- 
ropean morals, apparently in sympathy with ra- 
tionalism, and representing its very ripest culture. 
These are his words : *' It was reserved for Chris- 
tianity to present to the world an ideal character 
which throughout all the changes of eighteen cen- 
turies has inspired the hearts of men with an im- 
passioned love ; has shown itself capable of acting 



124 LECTURE FOUR TIL 

on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions ; 
has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, 
but the strongest incentive to its practice ; and 
has exercised so deep an influence that it may be 
truly said that the simple record of three short 
years of active life has done more to regenerate 
and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of 
philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. 
Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priest- 
craft and persecution and fanaticism that has de- 
faced the church, it has preserved, in the ex- 
ample and character of its founder, an enduring 
principle of regeneration." What else is this but 
a scientific acknowledgment that, regarded simply 
as a fact or phenomenon, this one supreme hiunaii 
power must be accounted for, and that the account 
of it is not found elsewhere than in the simple and 
modest records which portray it ? That is, it is 
of God, for man. 

" Unto you, O men, I call," once more. Let me 
say, as earnestly as I can, that it becomes the men 
of faith to bestir themselves, if only for the skep- 
tic's sake, and to become men of action. If there 
is dulness or stupor inside the church, who can 
wonder that there is not much attraction to her 
outside ? The church that is to arise and shine 
between these oceans, on the tops of these moun- 
tains, filling all the valleys with light, must be a 
church whose plans of help for the poor and 
the weak are on some scale of magnitude com- 
mensurate with the energies of the intellectual as 
well as the industrial and national elements, the 
drifts of emigration, and the dimensions of the con- 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 



125 



tiiient. There is an irresistible fascination in all 
progressive life. Such is the movement, or rather 
the monicntiun, of these material forces, that one 
sees no hope of any thing but burial and an epitaph 
for a Christianity that only looks over its own 
shoulder, a church which relies on nothing but its 
constitution for its health, which repeats its creed 
no otherwise than memoriter^ Avhose only perform- 
ances are imitative or automatic, and whose sole 
pride is in its pedigree. There is a remarkable 
passage of Lord Macaulay where, after sketch- 
ing vigorously what the new philosophy of Lord 
Bacon, as it came to be called in the time of 
Charles IL, has done for mankind, he concludes: 
*' These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first- 
fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests, 
which has never attained, which never counts itself 
perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yes- 
terday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be 
its starting-point to-morrow." 

In a time like this, then, which you and I and 
all the preachers cannot alter if we will, and would 
not, I hope, if we could, a church that is stationary 
in the business for which a church exists has no 
place and no business to be. It is an anachronism. 
It is not only out of date, but out of the plan of 
God. Men may tolerate it, as they tolerate in^ 
hrmity and mediocrity elsewhere, but they will 
not esteem it, or listen to it, or give God hearty 
thanks within it. 

We separate here, and go our ways. These few 
hours that we have spent together at the Master's 
feet — the common Master of our common heart 



126 LECTURE FOURTH. 

—have created, on my part at least, something of 
that human interest which our subject, as it has 
opened all along, has revealed as an element of 
constant attraction and power in the Faith itself. 
That subject at last becomes inevitably personal- 
I cannot bear to leave it without coming as close 
as you will let me to the vital point of the matter. 

Remember there is no loyalty to the kingdom 
without loyalty first to Jesus Christ. Whether 
you and I are true or false, the Tree of Life stands 
eternally, its leaves for the healing of the nations. 
But whether you and I live from it, and so live 
the noblest life we can for other men, and live 
forever, is a personal question. States are not 
strong without loyal citizens ; armies are not 
strong without loyal soldiers ; universities are not 
strong without loyal scholars. The church is 
strong in her divine commission and in her Lord ; 
and yet, in the demonstrated strength which men 
reckon and feel, the church is not strong and 
never can be, without loyal Christians on earth. 
The '' power" must Avork within first. Then you 
are able to say, '' It is no more I that live ; but the 
life that I live here in the flesh I live by the faith 
of the Son of God," who makes God's life to be 
the life of man. Within God's eternity and in- 
finitude of love our little lives are safe, however 
swift they run, if He and we are friends. 

It is not unmeet that the argument should rise, 
as it ends, into a higher strain. You will be ready 
to take up with me, I think, the blended notes 
of confession and triumph coming to us across the 
sea from a brother of our own blood and language 



CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. I 27 

and faith, as profound in iiis experience as he is 
eloquent in his verse. "'^ 

" Through paths of pleasant thought I ran ; 

False science sang enchanted airs ; 
She told of nature and of man, 

And of the godlike gifts he bears. 
But, when I sat down by the way, 

And thought out life, and thought out sin, 
The burning truths that round me la}^, 

And all the weak, proud self within ; 
Still in my inmost soul there wrought 

The sense of sin, the curse of doom. 
Till slowly broke upon my thought 

An eastern olive-garden's gloom : 
Hung on Thy cross 'twixt earth and heaven, 

I saw Thee, Son of Man, divine ! 
To Thee the bitter pain was given. 

But all the heavy guilt was mine. 
I know the serpent touched my heart, 

I saw his trail on hand and brow — 
No sinless thought, no perfect part, 

But sullied breast and broken vow. 
And then I felt my need of Thee, 

And pride's illusions passed away ; 
And oh ! that Thou hast died for me 

Is more than all the world can say. 
The wounded fawn, in yonder glade, 

Beside the doe seeks rest from harm ; 
The babe that scorned its mother's aid 

Flies to her at the least alarm. 
And thus I feel my need of Thee, 

When sin and pride would tempt me most ; 
And oh ! that Thou hast died for me, 

Is more than all the skeptic's boast." 

* Bishop Alexander of Derry. 



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